Based on survey responses from eighty-five scholars on the job market from 2013 and 2019, this article examines mentoring for the job market in rhetoric and composition and technical communication. Respondents indicate needs for job market mentoring; more transparency about the job market itself; and more extensive, integrated support throughout graduate programs. The article concludes with actions that can be taken to improve the job market experience in rhetoric and composition and technical communication programs.

Technical communication has long acknowledged that documents can be unethical and even oppressive and harmful. But not all forms or experiences of oppression are equivalent or similar, and it can be instrumental to analyze in particular how certain groups are wounded by specific documents. In this article, the authors use Ahmed's queer phenomenology to analyze institutional and government documents and demonstrate the ways that these technical documents create failed orientations. Then, through a focused analysis of a federal proposal policy, they show how these documents can produce failures for trans people in particular. The authors close by suggesting courses of actions for redressing these failures.