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This article aims to help doctoral students in technical communication prepare themselves for the academic job market and for the subsequent process of earning tenure and promotion in increasingly demanding environments. The authors propose that students do four things: (a) learn to spot and articulate research problems; (b) find their vocation—the work to which they feel a personal calling—within technical communication; (c) identify the research methods that best suit their personalities; and (d) articulate a research identity and agenda that they can explain at three different levels of abstraction: describing individual projects, naming the coherent themes that connect these projects, and defining themselves concisely as scholars. All these orienting practices involve students in stepping back, looking for larger patterns in their work and in their professional interests, and finding specific language to represent them.

As the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) has moved toward more inclusive perspectives, the use of decolonial frameworks has increased rapidly. However, TPC scholarship designed using decolonial frameworks lacks a clear, centralized definition and may overgeneralize and/or marginalize Indigenous concerns. Using a corpus analysis of TPC texts, we assess the ways that the field uses "decolonial" and propose a centralized definition of "decolonial" that focuses on rematriation of Indigenous land and knowledges. Further, we offer a heuristic that aids scholars in communication design appropriate for decolonial research and teaching strategies.

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