Elcom was my first real job in tech. I started in November 2022, a few weeks after finishing my HSC, and stayed for just over a year as a technical writer and manual tester on their CMS platform.
Most of that year was tied to the v12.0 release. A lot had changed in the product, and the documentation hadn’t kept up, so a big part of my job was going through it page by page, working out what was still accurate, and reorganising and rewriting it to match how v12.0 actually worked. That meant spending a lot of time in the product itself. You can’t write instructions for something you haven’t clicked through yourself, and more than once I found that the docs and the software disagreed about how a feature behaved.
The testing side came from the same place. I ran manual QA on pre-release builds, working through tester scripts step by step and logging anything that didn’t behave the way it should. Writing a good bug report turned out to be a skill of its own. “It’s broken” doesn’t help anyone. What helps is exactly what you did, what you expected to happen, what happened instead, and whether you can make it happen again.
Towards the end I put together training materials for the v12.0 rollout and helped populate content for client sites, which was a good look at how the people who actually use the platform think about it, compared to the people who build it.
Looking back, it was a pretty good first job for someone heading into security, even though I didn’t know that’s where I was heading at the time. Testing is basically paying close attention to where software doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, and documentation is about explaining a system clearly enough that someone else can use it without you. I use both of those pretty much every week now!