In this episode, I talk with Vladimir Izmalkov, an experienced technical communicator who has built and managed documentation teams and worked across open source and enterprise software in both English and Russian. We talk about his RPG-inspired "skill tree" for technical writers, how mapping your skills into different "classes" can help you make sense of a nonlinear career, and how to build a personal grading system that lets you evaluate yourself against a job's requirements and pitch your adjacent skills with confidence.

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Vladimir and I discuss his winding path into technical writing, which began at a Russian research institute where he worked on information and communication systems for emergency response, before he realized that his mix of technical breadth and a knack for working with documents pointed toward technical writing. We talk about his move to the UK to work at a London startup documenting an open source database, the tension he felt blending honest technical documentation with marketing, and his current role at Canonical, where the team calls themselves "technical authors" to reflect their authority over documentation and their collaborative, guidance-focused work with engineers.

The heart of our conversation is Vladimir's RPG-inspired "skill tree" for technical writers, a model he developed to capture how nonlinear and multidimensional our careers really are. He explains how the many skills a tech writer can develop behave like independent dimensions, and how thinking in terms of "classes" (like a linguistics-focused writer, a tech-curious engineer, a "docs tool sage" who loves automation and tooling, a marketer, or a team leader) can help you make sense of your own experience. We discuss visualizing all of this on a radar chart, and why the real value isn't the picture itself but the deeper understanding it gives you of your strengths and gaps.

We also dig into the practical grading system that makes the skill tree useful for job hunting. Vladimir walks through how to build a leveling scale from a job posting's requirements, grade yourself honestly against it, and then identify where adjacent skills can compensate for gaps, using the example of pitching Docs as Code experience when a role calls for DITA. We close on AI as its own branch of the skill tree, including why Vladimir is cautious about generating documentation from scratch and why his most reliable results come from using AI to build deterministic, testable scripts he can automate rather than automating the AI itself.

About Vladimir Izmalkov:

Vladimir Izmalkov is a technical writer with 15+ years of experience creating developer-oriented documentation in Russian and English. A docs-as-code advocate, he has documented NoSQL databases, cloud platforms, and distributed systems, and takes a thoughtful, cautious approach to AI in technical documentation.

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