Meet Claire, a South African native learning from Kilkenny, Ireland. Claire has over 13 years of experience working in the SaaS environment as a versatile lead technical writer and web content creator, but that wasn’t always her career. Learn more about how Claire used Coursera courses to help her improve her skills at every stage of her career.
Hi, I’m Claire! Allow me to guide you through my varied career path. When I was younger, I had aspirations to be a teacher, so I studied English at university and graduated with not only a bachelor’s degree, but also a master’s degree. I got a job as a high school English teacher in South Africa. However, it was not the fulfillment of the desires I had for myself and my career. I decided to switch careers to writing and content creation and got a job as an academic content creator. This combined my passion for copywriting, social media and education.
After my contract for that role ended, I began looking for positions where I could write educational content in the technical field. I was lucky enough to get a job at Adobe, a large software development company, as a technical lead. In this role, I created an online database, developed a content program for a beta cloud project, developed UX designs, and reported on content analysis and crawling in the Adobe Support Center. To improve my technical and customer support skills, I enrolled in my first three courses on Coursera: Getting Started with Empathy Mapping User Experience in Miro, Introduction to HTML, and User Experience (UX) Basics Design by Google.
Through these courses, I learned how to better understand and empathize with user experience (UX) and design websites using HTML code.
In October 2022, I left my secured contract role at Adobe for a full-time lead technical writer position at Keelvar. Now I’m rounding out my skills by taking even more courses: Starting the UX Design Process: Empathy, Definition and Ideation, Conducting UX Research and Early Concept Testing, and Creating Wireframes and Low-Fidelity Prototyping, all also from Google. The thing is, once you start – can you ever stop? With so many avenues to explore and possibilities to discover, who knows where my career will take me!
We all have strengths, but in these courses I have found that my strengths have now become skills that I can apply to many aspects of my career and my life. I have a deep love for the user journey and a real heart for people and what they experience. With over a decade of writing for SaaS companies, being able to incorporate these passions into my work through empathy mapping and the UX design process has helped me understand who I’m writing for and why. I no longer look at a document or UI guide as just a task, but as an opportunity to make someone else’s life easier and simpler. If I can write to the needs of the user, the company as a whole can only grow and benefit from customers who feel understood.
Coursera makes learning fun and easy. From annual subscriptions at amazing prices to individual course funding, this is your time to be the change you’ve been desperate to see. For the students out there, I leave you with this:
Push yourself. You can do it and you will do it. Whatever you think your limits are, go beyond them. You are more than you think you are and there is a whole world waiting for you to make it.
Reach for it. It. Yippee. Your.
