Field Guide
Hiring an Aerospace Technical Writer
The Role
What You Are Hiring For
The Bureau of Labor Statistics describes technical writers as people who “prepare instruction manuals, how-to guides” and other documents that make technical information easier to use. In aerospace and defense, two things change the job. The source material is engineering data rather than a draft someone else wrote, and the output has to conform to a specification: S1000D, MIL-STD-40051E, ATA iSpec 2200, or whichever one the contract names.
That makes the role narrower and harder than most job boards suggest. A generalist who writes well can succeed, but only if they can read the data and work inside the rules. A specialist who knows the standard but writes unclear procedures is a liability, because unclear procedures reach the people who maintain the equipment.
Template
A Job Description You Can Adapt
Replace the bracketed parts with your program's details, and delete what does not apply. Name the standard and issue: “S1000D experience” attracts a different candidate than “S1000D Issue 4.2 under MIL-STD-3031B business rules,” and the second one tells applicants you know what you are hiring for.
Summary
- Write and maintain the technical manuals for [platform or product]: maintenance, operator, and parts information, delivered to [S1000D Issue X / MIL-STD-40051E / ATA iSpec 2200] under the program's business rules.
Responsibilities
- Write procedures and descriptions from engineering data: drawings, models, parts lists, and engineering change notices.
- Work with engineers, logisticians, and maintainers to confirm technical accuracy, and run content through review and validation.
- Author in the program's structured environment and keep content valid against its schemas and business rules.
- Incorporate engineering changes into existing manuals, keeping revision marking and change records accurate.
- Apply the program's style guide and, where required, Simplified Technical English.
Required
- A portfolio or samples that show clear procedural writing, ideally for equipment someone has to maintain.
- Ability to read engineering drawings and parts lists.
- Experience writing from subject matter experts who are busy with other work.
- [Only if the contract requires it:] eligibility for a security clearance, or U.S.-person status for export-controlled data. Name which one.
Preferred
- Experience with the standard the contract names, and with an XML editor or common source database.
- Training in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.
- Maintenance, military, or engineering background.
Skills
What Actually Predicts Success
In rough order of how hard each one is to teach after hiring:
- Clear procedural writing
- One action per step, in the order a technician performs it, with warnings and cautions where they belong. Everything else in the role rests on this, and it is the hardest skill to teach.
- Reading engineering data
- The source material is drawings, models, parts lists, and change notices, not a finished draft. A writer who can work out from a drawing what a task involves needs fewer engineering hours to get it right.
- Working with subject matter experts
- Engineers answer questions between other priorities. The writers who succeed ask precise questions, bring a draft rather than a blank page, and know when an answer does not match the data.
- Fluency in the contract's standard
- S1000D, MIL-STD-40051E, and iSpec 2200 each organize content differently. Experience with the standard your contract names shortens onboarding, but every program has its own issue, business rules, and toolchain, so an experienced hire still has to learn yours.
- Tools
- XML editors, common source databases, and publishing systems. Useful, and the most teachable item on this list: weeks, not years.
The order matters when you have to choose. Hire for the top of the list and train for the bottom. Our guides to writing to ASD-STE100 and learning S1000D show what that training covers. If the role is mostly XML, schemas, and publishing pipelines, you may be hiring a technical content engineer rather than a writer, and the posting should say so. If you are weighing the job from the candidate side, see careers in technical publications.
Clearance and Export
Write the Requirement You Actually Have
“Must be clearable” and “must be a U.S. person” are different requirements, and postings often use one when they mean the other. A security clearance applies to classified work. For contractors, the government decides who is eligible, and the employer may request eligibility only where classified access is essential to a classified contract. Eligibility starts with a contract need, not with the candidate.
Most technical manuals are unclassified, but many are export-controlled. Under the ITAR, a U.S. person includes a lawful permanent resident as well as a citizen, and releasing controlled technical data to a foreign person can be an export even inside the United States. Our guide to ITAR technical data covers what that means for the manuals themselves.
None of this is legal advice. Before you post, confirm with your facility security officer or export compliance officer which requirement the program carries, and write only that one. An unnecessary requirement shrinks a candidate pool that is already small.
Screening
Test on Real Work
Resumes in this field are full of standard names. Short exercises show who can do the work:
- A rewrite exercise
- Give candidates a paragraph of dense engineering prose describing a procedure and ask for numbered steps. You learn in a few minutes whether they find the actions, the order, and the hazards.
- A task from source data
- Hand over a simple drawing or parts list and a change notice, and ask what the change does to an existing procedure. This tests the reading skill that most separates aerospace writers from general ones.
- A data module exercise (S1000D roles)
- Show a data module code and ask what it identifies, or give a short data module with errors and ask for corrections. Our DMC decoder and interview questions give you material for both.
For the interview itself, our S1000D interview questions give twelve questions in three tiers with what a strong answer covers, and the DMC decoder makes a quick shared reference for the data module exercise. Keep every exercise free of proprietary or controlled data.
Build or Borrow
Hiring Is One of Three Options
Experienced writers in a specific standard are scarce, and a search can take longer than the program can wait. Teams that need capability faster usually combine three approaches: hire strong writers and train them in the standard on their own content, bring in contract support for a backlog or a conversion, and keep the long-term ownership in house.
Which mix fits depends on how steady the workload is and how much the program's knowledge needs to stay inside the company. Our in-house versus outsourced comparison sets out where each one wins, including where outsourcing to us is the wrong call. If you are training rather than hiring, our training and coaching run on your program's rules and data.
FAQ
Questions We Hear
What does an aerospace technical writer do?
Writes and maintains the manuals people use to operate and maintain aircraft, vehicles, and equipment: procedures, descriptions, fault isolation, and parts information. Most of the work starts from engineering data rather than a draft, and most of it happens inside a specification such as S1000D, MIL-STD-40051E, or ATA iSpec 2200, under the program's business rules.
Should we require experience with S1000D or MIL-STD-40051?
Prefer it, but think twice before making it a hard requirement. Experience with the standard shortens onboarding, but each program's rules differ, so every hire needs program training anyway. A strong procedural writer who reads engineering data well can learn the standard with structured training. A weak writer with the right keywords on a resume is harder to fix.
Do aerospace technical writers need a security clearance?
Only if the work requires access to classified information. For contractors, the government, not the employer, decides who is eligible, and the employer may request eligibility only where classified access is essential to a classified contract. Many technical manuals are unclassified but export-controlled, which is a different requirement. Write the one your program actually has into the job description.
Can a non-U.S. citizen work on ITAR-controlled manuals?
Under the ITAR, a U.S. person includes a lawful permanent resident, not just a citizen. Releasing ITAR-controlled technical data to a foreign person, even inside the United States, can be an export that needs authorization. Classified access is stricter again. This is not legal advice: confirm the requirement for your program with your export compliance officer before you write it into a posting.
How long should a writing test take?
Short enough that a strong candidate with a current job will do it. A focused exercise that takes about an hour tells you more than a long one that good candidates decline. Use your own kind of content, with nothing proprietary or controlled in it.
Get In Touch
Need Capacity Before You Can Hire?
We write and convert technical manuals to S1000D and the MIL-STD formats, and we train the writers you hire so they can carry the work after us. Tell us what your program needs.