If you want to be a documentation specialist, the only qualification is that you have to be willing to settle for low pay and almost zero respect.
Software developers have the attitude that documentation is not important and therefore is beneath them. This coincidentally dovetails very nicely with the fact that almost none of them can put a sentence together intelligibly. (Fellow TR members of course excepted; bulletin boards automatically select for the one-percenters with language skills. ^_^ )
My wife has a master's degree in English and lots of work experience, much of it in IT operations. IT shops typically offer her about two-thirds the starting salary for a programmer--to do the work the programmers are incapable of doing. It's about as bad as the way she was treated when she applied to become a schoolteacher. Needless to say she didn't pursue either career.
Training, on the other hand, is a good career that earns respect. In-house you'll make as much money as the programmers; as a consultant you'll pull in as much as $800 a day plus expenses.
However, virtually everyone I know in the field started out as a technician. We all occasionally get a chance to give a presentation and if we do well then we get to put together a short class, and so forth. They really expect you to know your subject matter from first-hand experience.
The only exceptions are former schoolteachers. They figure that if you can teach New Math to a room full of rowdy children, you won't have any trouble at all mastering MS Project or DB2 and presenting it to a group of cooperative adults.
Either way, it's a tough field to break into with zero experience. I suppose if you want to go directly from university into a technical training job, your best path might be to get a degree in education. But I'm just reasoning this out, I don't know anyone who's tried it.
As for technical writing, it's a demeaning job but if you want it there shouldn't be much competition. There are lots of IT people looking for work but they can't write any better than the ones who already have jobs. ^_^
It's a shame that language skills are not rewarded more highly in our society. Even editorial positions with magazines don't pay drenn.
