Success has been defined as the ability to go from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.

 - Not Churchill or Lincoln

I am now the COO of a company that focuses on security for voice systems, but a few years ago, I was the manager of a documentation team at a large MNC. I often get approached by people who love the idea of changing their careers but are worried that they may have to start from scratch. Their big question is: What about the years of effort and investment I've made in gaining these skills – if I change my career, do they amount to nothing?

First, some context:  Over the last 30 years, I have moved from journalism to technical writing to operations. The transition from journalism to technical writing was fairly straightforward – I was already in tech journalism when the opportunity to document an in-development product came along. The transition from tech-writing to operations has been more of a zig-zag thing. I first moved to operations when I co-founded a technical writing services company in 2005. Then, in 2010, we decided to sell it off on a no-profit, no-loss basis to an American firm. As for me, I moved back to being a documentation manager at one of those large MNCs. After 4 years there, I was once again bitten by the entrepreneurship bug and co-founded my current company – Assertion, which is into security products for voice systems. Here, too, I work on the company's operations – controlling finances, allocating resources, creating policies, and ensuring that the CEO's vision gets translated into results. In short, I believe I am at least somewhat qualified to answer questions on career transitions – do tech-writing skills transfer well to other domains?

A step further, one of the less talked about skills of a good technical writer is understanding technical issues and seeing them in a business light (and vice-versa). This capability is more fundamental than you might normally think. The average R&D employee is focused on modeling the world in black-and-white terms – purely technical, rational, and judgment-free. Business, however, is a messier thing – business teams make decisions based on data, insight, intuition, and (they'll never admit it) pure guesswork. 

The key thing, however, which applies equally to technical writers and people from every other field, is that transitions are much more about a learning attitude. Successfully transitioning from one role to another or one career to another is built on repeatedly asking yourself just one question – over and over and over – What did I learn from this?