Senior Technical Editor

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials is currently hiring a Senior Technical Editor a full time position located in our Washington DC office.

The Senior Technical Editor aids the Assistant Director of Publications in the production of the Associations technical publications. These publications are created through collaboration with subject matter experts from the state DOTs which are the Associations members. Publishing these technical guidelines and standards is a critical part of the mission of the organization and these publications are distributed and sold to our members and industry to assist with transportation best practices and standards.

The Senior Technical Editor is responsible for moving committee approved content through the various steps of production to a completed publication ready for distribution. The incumbent is responsible for the production of multiple technical publications per year through a rigorous process. The process requires the incumbent to:

• copyedit and proofread documents
• communicate extensively with authors, vendors, committee members and technical staff to ensure technical accuracy
• expedite the progress of a document from the balloting process through to query responses
• perform extensive desktop publishing
• implement accessibility features
• review final proofs and make preparations for printing and online posting or both
• help to establish the annual publishing queue
• work with members and industry to provide continuous improvements to the technical publications and process

The incumbent uses MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, Adobe Creative Suite including InDesign (the main layout software used), Illustrator, and Photoshop and Adobe Acrobat Pro software to produce primarily accessible technical documents and occasionally marketing materials and presentations for technical committee meetings as needed.

The incumbent will be requested to attend local and out of town meetings to meet with author committees and to staff Publication exhibits.

The incumbent is responsible for adhering to and contributing to the maintenance of the AASHTO Publications style manual and guides editorial standard operating procedures and for referring to the Chicago Manual of Style.

The incumbent should be skilled in working efficiently in partnership with fellow editors or independently with little supervision, communicating project status and potential challenges to the Assistant Director of Publications.

The incumbent is also responsible for completing a variety of general administrative tasks in support of the Publications Division following the production procedures for electronic organization and project closeouts.

The successful candidate will have a minimum of 5 7 years of technical and large book production experience using a variety of digital production processes. Previous association or non profit work is desirable but not required. A bachelors degree in English or course work in any of the following technical editing, design, publishing, printing, project management and digital publishing production is required.

The candidate must have excellent demonstrated written and oral communication skills as well as technical copyediting, proofreading, desktop publishing and project management skills. The incumbent is oftentimes required to juggle multiple projects at one time and should be skilled in working efficiently and collaboratively with others and leading project teams. The incumbent must have knowledge of PC based word processing MS Word, desktop publishing design software InDesign and Illustrator, and skills in other PC applications such as PDF creation and modification equation creation spreadsheet manipulation.

Also a demonstrated understanding of all aspects of the publication process including digital preparation is required. The incumbent must have the ability to work under pressure and meet tight deadlines. Experience using WCAG accessibility features is a plus.

This position primarily reports out of our Washington DC office located in Metro Center.

• Perks and Benefits This position primarily…