Professional experience

Senior Manager, Technical Communications

8/2017 – 5/2025

Cengage Learning, Inc.

Independence, KY (remote)

800-354-9706

Transformed technical communications at Cengage from dozens of scattered agent-focused PDFs and proprietary helps into a coherent self-service experience with 6500 customer-focused articles and FY25 case deflection savings of $10.8 million¹.

• Built a high-functioning distributed technical communications team with partnerships across support, technology, marketing, and content development.
• Successfully managed competing development timelines, business priorities, and customer pain points across a portfolio that included eight online learning platforms, seven LMS integrations, and hundreds of titles.
• Implemented agile practices for the team to manage workload and ensure timely delivery on commitments. This included issue tracking and refinement in JIRA, rubric-based prioritization, daily standups, and retrospectives.
• Improved SEO of self support information so customers could easily access needed articles from Google.
• Reduced work and regressions by implementing modern content operations practices such as git source control, peer reviewed pull requests, release testing, and Jenkins continuous integration builds and deployments.
• Standardized content operations and enabled content reuse by converting or rewriting legacy content from Word, FrameMaker, and Flare to DITA.
• Supported writers and customers with DITA schema specializations for consistent topic structure and custom filtering attributes.
• Increased consistency of terminology and usage across platform, marketing, sales, support, and help collateral by developing and evangelizing consistent style guidelines and content taxonomy.
• Changed how help information is viewed internally from a pro-forma responsibility to an opportunity to solve real-world problems for our customers and provide real value to the business.
• Enabled support agents and customers easier access to help information with an automated index of articles for use by the Agentforce AI chatbot in Salesforce.
• Addressed ongoing usability problems by developing and staffing a new UX writer role, providing improved consistency in terminology and developing rules, standards, and a pattern library for UI microcopy.

Senior Technical Writer

12/2008 – 8/2017 (first 6 months as contractor)

Cengage Learning / Advanced Instructional Systems, DBA WebAssign

Raleigh, NC

800-354-9706

Researched and wrote topic-based help, embedded user assistance, and quick start guides for WebAssign and PlaceU learning platforms.

• Authored user interface text with input from UX and product management.
• Wrote and maintained DITA-OT plugins for customized help, embedded user assistance, and PDF deliverables.
• Developed content strategy, vision, and architecture for user assistance / help.
• Wrote and maintained application code for online help and embedded user assistance.
• Wrote and maintained scripts for Jenkins continuous integration builds.
• Wrote and maintained XSLT scripts for ingesting content from varied sources.
• Led conversion of FrameMaker documentation to DITA.

Technical Writer

5/2005 - 11/2008

CTG, Inc., contracted to IBM

Research Triangle Park, NC

919-337-1351

Wrote topic-based content for the IBM Director systems management software.

• Built Eclipse information center, PDF, and HTML help deliverables using ID Workbench and Ant-based transformations.
• Maintained style guide for the IBM Director information development team.
• Served as backup to the team lead.

Technical Writer

4/2005 – 5/2005

TekSystems, Inc., contracted to Sealy, Inc. (IT Department)

Trinity, NC

336-861-3919

Wrote IT security policy/SOP documents for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, updated internal policies website, and created templates and publishing process for future SOPs and policies.

Technical Writer

2003 – 2005

T-P-S Inc., contracted to ABB

Raleigh, NC

919-460-9644

Updated and expanded the seven user guides, training materials and two online help systems for the CADOPS, netCADOPS and FeederAll software for modeling electrical distribution networks.

Technical Writer

2000 – 2001

Make Systems, Inc. (now OpNet Technologies)

Cary, NC

919-461-2445

Updated and expanded web-based help and PDF documentation of the NetMaker network modeling tool.

Associate Program Mgr. for Computer Organization

1996 – 2000

UPBEAT Program, VA GLAHS & UCLA Jonsson Cancer Center

Los Angeles, CA

310-268-4000

Provided technical writing, administrative, and computer support to a nine-site national VA demonstration project assessing the benefits of psychogeriatric screening, intervention, and follow-up in over 2500 elderly veterans.

Teacher / Graduate Student

1994 – 1996

University of Denver English Department

Denver, CO

303-871-2266

Taught first-year undergraduate English core curriculum classes focusing on expository writing and research skills; facilitated computer writing labs.