PathSource - SECURITY EVANGELIST: Using A Liberal Arts Degree To Inform The World About Our Security Challenges

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SECURITY EVANGELIST: Using A Liberal Arts Degree To Inform The World About Our Security Challenges

About this video

Stephen uses blogs and social media to educate the world about the security challenges we all face. His studies in liberal arts prepared him to effectively communicate the important technical issues and work of his colleagues.

Degree: English Language and Literature - Religion/Religious Studies

Job Title: Security Evangelist

Employer: ESET Endpoint Security

Job Summary: Technical Writers

Job Description

Technical writers, also called technical communicators, produce instruction manuals and other supporting documents to communicate complex and technical information more easily. They also develop, gather, and disseminate technical information among customers, designers, and manufacturers.

Technical writers create operating instructions, how-to manuals, assembly instructions, and “frequently asked questions” pages to help technical support staff, consumers, and other users within a company or an industry. After a product is released, technical writers also may work with product liability specialists and customer service managers to improve the end-user experience through product design changes.

Technical writers often work with engineers, scientists, computer specialists, and software developers to manage the flow of information among project workgroups during development and testing. Therefore, technical writers must be able to understand complex information and communicate the information to people with diverse professional backgrounds.

Applying their knowledge of the user of the product, technical writers may serve as part of a team conducting usability studies to help improve the design of a product that is in the prototype stage. Technical writers may conduct research on their topics through personal observation, library and Internet research, and discussions with technical specialists.

Increasingly, technical information is being delivered online, and technical writers are using the interactive technologies of the Web to blend text, graphics, multidimensional images, sound, and video.

On-the-Job Training

Some training may be necessary to adapt to this style of writing.

Additional Info

Some technical writers begin their careers not as writers, but as specialists or research assistants in a technical field. By developing technical communication skills, they eventually assume primary responsibilities for technical writing. In small firms, beginning technical writers may work on projects right away; in larger companies with more standard procedures, beginners may observe experienced technical writers and interact with specialists before being assigned projects.

Quick Facts

Average salary

National Statistic Change Location

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$40,000 - $100,000

Projected Job Growth

15 to 20 percent

Typical schedule

Full-time, Flexible, Part-time

Typical workplace

Home, Indoor, Office

Personal Qualities

Detail oriented, Technical skills, Written communication skills

Educational Path

Education Requirement

Associate degree
Bachelor's degree

Recommended Education Degree

Associate degree
Bachelor's degree

Recommended Majors

Writing
Communication
Journalism

Related Careers

Computer Hardware Engineers
Computer Programmers
Editors
Interpreters and Translators
Public Relations Managers and Specialists
Writers and Authors

View Detailed Career Data

PathSource provides free English transcriptions for each of our informational interviews on video which will appear here after you have signed in. Our advanced transcriptions are highly interactive. They scroll down automatically as the video plays and users can jump to a specific part of the video by clicking on any word in the transcript.

For a small fee, we offer transcriptions in different languages, making PathSource a great tool for English Language Learners. This feature is currently available for customers in the education field only.

Please contact us at support@pathsoruce.com if you have any questions or would like to get a price quote for advanced transcripts offered in a second language.

P3.instances[0].transcript.parse_transcript_data({"transcript":"So my current job, I am security evangelist for ESET. ESET makes anti-virus products, and my job is to educate the world about the security challenges that we face today. In a typical week I will probably do some research about a security topic, write it up into a blog post, which we publish on our website at blog.eset.com. And then I will use social media to spread the news of that. I also work with the other researchers to find out what they're finding new in the area of security. And they're busy doing really cool stuff, like reverse engineering viruses and things like that, that we can then use to make our product better. My career education path. Very interesting, obviously it's been a long career path. But there are a surprising number of people in my field who actually came from a liberal arts background. And so one of the key things that we need in the area of science and technology is people who can explain things. In the anti-virus business, you have people who do some very, very deep coding. So they need to really good computer science skills, coding skills. And we hire people like that at our company in our research areas and our product development. But then we also need people who understand what those coders are doing, that can explain it in a way that ordinary people understand. Because the average person or average company buying an anti-virus product, they're not a coder. So we have to do that scientific writing, or technical writing, to explain what's going on. And that makes the background in the literature, and specifically English language, important. Also, a lot of anti-virus companies are international. So ESET's based in Slovakia. If a bunch of us go out to dinner, maybe 20 people at a conference like this, maybe two or three speak English as their first language. So on the other hand, if you're in school in America, get a second language, a third language. Be prepared to learn another language. Gives you a lot more ability to get jobs around the world. I think what you'll find is that the really good jobs have a high entry bar. Although there are a lot of tech jobs, a lot of programming jobs, the good companies hire good people. So you do need good grades, you need to also, I think, study widely. Don't get too focused in your studies. Be prepared to be flexible. I started out in banking, then auditing, then got into computers, got into a computer security, and from there into anti-virus. Be prepared, over time, for your career to change based on what's happening in the market for jobs, and what you like to do, which might change over time. ","file":{"id":195531,"video_id":"2707738446001","name":"60930300","duration":179072,"thumbnail_url":null}});