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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.

This paper shares lessons learned from seventeen years of teaching and administering an online master's program in technical communication. We conclude that online education in general-and asynchronous online education in particular-is comparable to face-to-face education but different in many respects. The differences represent both hazards for teachers to avoid (and to help students to avoid) and opportunities for learning. This paper suggests ways to make the best of these differences, discusses the effects of the flexible schedule afforded by asynchronous instruction, explains the need to anticipate different student expectations, offers advice on time management and participation for both teachers and students, and discusses the value of archived class discussions.

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