If you’ve looked at any recruitment pages recently, you may have noticed a lot of jargon creeping into job titles. Here we strip the acronyms and buzzwords away to reveal the – often quite straightforward – roles that lie underneath.

UX Writer 

UX stands for user experience. What a UX writer does is craft the little bits of copy that steer users through key journeys on an app or website – opening a bank account, for example, or completing an insurance quote form or upgrading your access to a product. You’ll be writing the little bits of “microcopy,” such as button names, navigation labels, and calls to action. This is a growing specialty and often involves working alongside specialists who are testing customer behaviour, but a lot of it is common sense for the right kind of writer. More here

B2B CRM Copywriter 

B2B just means business-to-business, so you’ll be writing for a company that sells to other businesses (rather than individual consumers). For writers, CRM (customer relationship management) generally means email. You’ll be providing the words for sales and marketing emails, plus landing pages: the page that people land on if they click on a link in the email.

Bid Writer 

Complex contracts in industries like medicine, IT, and construction are awarded to businesses through a lengthy tendering process. Companies have to complete lengthy documents such as PQQs (pre-qualification questionnaires – the preliminary phase) all the way through to full pitch or tender documents. Putting these giant docs together is a massive job, with technical information having to be gathered from lots of different departments. Bid writers are often freelance, and it’s a lucrative role if you have the right skills and background knowledge of procurement in a relevant industry, but it’s not for the faint-hearted.

Item Writer

Item writers typically write model exam answers and other guidance to support examiners who are marking student papers. They need relevant educational credentials.

SEO Content Writer

SEO is search engine optimisation, so you’ll be writing copy that helps a business rank well in search engine results for particular phrases. This may involve doing keyword research, writing meta descriptions, and generally composing copy in a way best designed to please Google, but it’s not as complex as it sounds. Much of it is common sense, and there’ll often be a search team to support. More here

Thought Leadership Content Writer

Thought leadership is a much-overused phrase that really just means content that showcases an individual or business’ knowledge or expertise in a given area. For writers, it tends to involve interviewing company experts and writing up their thoughts in the form of user-friendly posts, articles, and white papers.

Conceptual Copywriter

In their search for big impact, these people write very, very few words but delete thousands along the way. Often working alongside an art director, they’ll come up with the big idea or slogan that pulls a whole campaign together. Don’t be deceived – this work is much harder than it looks and is very competitive.

Brand Storyteller

Brand storytelling is one of those slippery terms that seems to mean whatever you want it to mean. It’s about using storytelling techniques in marketing to provoke emotion and is often video-focused, but you could say the same about most advertising and lots of content marketing, too! Anyhow, for a writer, it’s likely to mean coming up with narratives that promote a business in quite a lateral or original way, and writing supporting scripts and copy.

When looking at writing jobs, don’t dismiss roles out of hand just because you may not know the terminology used. An SEO writer does not need to be a technical specialist in SEO, for example. At the same time, it’s wise to try and really understand what’s involved so you don’t waste time and effort applying for things that will never be a good fit for you.

BIO – Dan Brotzel’s debut collection of short stories is Hotel du Jack (Sandstone Press)