Angela Bauche is an Associate Technical Director serving as a mentor and consultant on projects throughout Wizeline. Angela began her career at Wizeline through Wizeline Academy’s technical writing program, having no experience as a Technical Writer at the time. In the last four years, she’s been promoted three times and has proven to herself and the company that she can excel at anything she aspires to accomplish. In this interview, she tells her story — of how she leveraged her communications background and experience working with microsites to enter the field of technical writing, and how participating in Wizeline’s mentorship program, among other initiatives, enabled her to build self-confidence and become the leader she is today.
Angela was born and raised in Guadalajara, where she’s spent all of her life. Attending college was the norm in her family — two of her brothers graduated college, her mother studied communications and later psychology, and her father owned a clothing company. Following their example, she graduated from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO), earning a bachelor’s degree in communication science. Her journey was not a straight path, but the lessons she learned along the way serve as the foundation for the successful professional she’s become.
Angela was introduced to technology at a young age along with her three brothers, who enjoyed solving technical challenges. “I’d consider my brothers above-average when it comes to technology. We never had to worry about computer issues because they would always figure out how to fix them. One of them even started programming when he was 11.” She spent her high school years unsure of what she wanted to do and which path she’d follow in college. Then, she stumbled upon animation. “When I first heard of it, I was immediately excited to get started. Macromedia Flash was the hype software for animation at the time, and I knew this is what I wanted to go to school for,” Angela explains.
While at ITESO, Angela furthered her interest in communications, enjoying anything related to multimedia, programming, animating, designing, and writing. She attributes her success in writing to two of her college professors. “When you’re staring at a blank page, and you’re not sure how to begin writing, it can be intimidating. These teachers taught us a formula to translate our ideas into a written piece. Essentially, you just start by writing a one-sentence idea per paragraph; it doesn’t have to be good, it just has to convey what you want to say. Then you go from there,” she explains. When asked if any projects stood out to her, she noted a social service assignment where she and a group of classmates created a documentary and website to help immigrants promote and sell their purses at local markets. Pairing her love for multimedia with helping the local community was intensely gratifying.
At the core of Angela’s love for animation was her drive to overcome challenges and continuously improve her abilities — she never grew complacent, always wanting to learn more and hone her existing skills. Shortly after beginning her college program, she realized the limitations of Macromedia Flash and decided that she would need to learn coding to increase the capabilities of her interactive animations. She began with ActionScript, an object-oriented programming language for Macromedia Flash. “Accomplishing one thing led me to want to accomplish another thing with the script and so on,” she says. With her newfound programming skills, she was ready for the next challenge — building websites using Macromedia Flash. Her experience with Flash would soon lead her into a post-college career.
Leveraging the skills she learned in college, Angela landed a position at El Informador, a local newspaper company, where she created microsites. For her, creating a consumable piece of content from an idea or story and publishing it for the world to read and interact with was rewarding. She would oversee all processes of these microsites, from researching the content to creating the animations and writing the programming behind it. “What I loved most about working at the newspaper company was researching about different topics all the time and having a new obstacle to solve with every story,” Angela states. “I’d enjoy brainstorming ways that animations could improve storytelling and thinking of new ways to interact with the readers of each story.” This position equipped her with various foundational skills that she would later apply to her technical writing career.
Four years later, in 2010, she accepted a position as a frontend web developer at HP, where she later moved into project management. Working for an international company was a novel experience, and something she realized she enjoyed. “It was cool meeting and interacting with people from all over the world and learning about their different work styles,” Angela explains. After three or so years as a project manager, Angela realized she needed to shift her focus from work to family. She was pregnant with her second child and wanted to work part-time to spend more time with her children while they were young — a decision that led her to work at her husband’s software company, Enlace Fiscal, for the next two years.
It was the beginning of 2018 when Angela’s journey took another turn. She missed working full time and having her own professional place apart from her husbands’ company, even though she says they worked great together. Living in Guadalajara her entire life, she remembered hearing about a local technology company with great opportunities. “Everyone referred to Wizeline as the cool place to work in town. But they also knew that very smart people worked there, and the company had extremely high standards,” Angela explains. Still, she set her eyes on technical writing and researched everything she could about a field she had never heard of before. It quickly became clear that most of her experience with microsites was directly transferable to technical writing. “With technical writing, you don’t need to know how to program, but you do need to understand it. You are also fixing problems with writing. You are translating complex information into beautiful documentation, which is exactly what I did with microsites, so I related to it,” she explains.
Though some qualifications — like understanding programming concepts and writing for the web — may overlap between building microsites and technical writing, Angela acknowledged that she was likely not qualified to enter the technical writing field at a company like Wizeline with zero direct experience. That’s when Angela was introduced to Wizeline Academy, which proved to be the provenance of her technical writing career.
Angela expresses her gratitude for the program, having had the opportunity to learn under experts in the field, but refers to it as an eye-opening and challenging experience. “I saw that technical writing involved way more and was much more difficult than I had originally imagined, so I started getting this horrible imposter syndrome. I would fixate on my homework assignment feedback, and had no confidence that I would get the job or — if I did — be good at it,” she explains.
During this time, she leaned on her mentor Berenice Beltrán, a senior technical writer, who taught her the hard skills required for the job and power skills like self-confidence. Angela speaks to Berenice’s significant impact on her growth: “She was amazing. It felt reassuring to have someone in my corner, telling me what I could do and encouraging me to see it through. She helped me with homework assignments, recommended me for an interview, and then made sure I was prepared for it.” Angela officially became a Wizeliner in April of 2018.