Meet Claire, a South Africa native learning from Kilkenny, Ireland. Claire has over 13 years of experience working in a SaaS environment as a multi-skilled Lead Technical Writer and Web Content Creator, but that was not always her chosen career path. Learn more about how Claire has used Coursera courses to help advance her skills in every phase of her career journey.
Hi I’m Claire! Let me walk you through my diverse career journey. When I was younger, I had aspirations of teaching, so in university I majored in English and graduated with not only my Bachelors, but a Masters as well. I landed a job as a high school English teacher in South Africa. However, it wasn’t fulfilling the desires I had for myself and my career. I decided to make a career switch into content writing and creation and landed a job as an Academic Content Creator. This combined my passion for copywriting, social media, and education.
After my contract was up for that role, I began looking for positions where I could write educational content in the technical field. I was lucky enough to land a job at Adobe, a massive software development company, as a Technical Content Lead. In that role, I created an online database, developed a content program for a beta cloud project, drafted UX proposals, and reported on analytics and content crawl in the Adobe Support Center. To better enhance my technical skills and customer support I enrolled in my first three courses on Coursera: Get Started with Empathy Mapping the User Experience in Miro, Introduction to HTML, and Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design by Google.
Through those courses, I learned how to better understand and empathize with the user’s experience (UX) and design web pages using HTML code.
In October of 2022, I left my secured contract role at Adobe for a full-time Lead Technical Writer position at Keelvar. Now I am rounding off my skills by completing even more courses: Start the UX Design Process: Empathize, Define, and Ideate, Conduct UX Research and Test Early Concepts, and Build Wireframes and Low-Fidelity Prototypes – all from Google as well. The thing is though, once you start – can you ever stop? With so many avenues to explore and options to discover, who knows where my career will take me!
We all have strengths, but what I have found with these courses is that my strengths have now become skills that I can apply to many facets of my career, and my life. I have a deep-seated love for the user journey, and a genuine heart for people and what they experience. With over a decade of writing for SaaS companies, being able to funnel these passions into my job through empathy mapping and the UX design process has helped me understand who I am writing for, and why. I no longer look at a document or UI guide as just a task, but as an opportunity to make somebody else’s life easier, and simpler. If I can write to the needs of a user, the company as a whole can only grow and benefit from customers that feel understood.
Coursera is learning-made-fun and easy. From yearly subscriptions at amazing prices, to individual funding per course – this is your time to be the change you have been so desperate to see. To learners out there, I will leave you with this:
Push yourself. You can do it, and you will. Whatever you believe your limits are, go beyond. You are more than you think you are, and there is a whole world waiting for you to make your mark.
Reach for it. It. Is. Yours.
