IT Professional

• Able to provide accurate reports given my background as a business analyst, quality assurance specialist, digital marketing expert, medical writer and technical writer.
• Self-sufficient deadline-driven worker and also able contribute significantly to any team.

Business Analyst & Quality Assurance Specialist Experience

• Cambridge Investment Research (USA) – achievements over a two year period:

Business analyst and Quality Assurance Specialist work as part of an Agile team.

Implemented an e-signature software program. Liaised with various departments such as technical support, operations and legal to make sure that the software was integrated and customized in a systematic way so that all the necessary checks and balances were in place. This work involved testing a variety of scenarios to make sure the program would cater for all possible outcomes. Used SQL to analyze various problems.

Researched and wrote a lengthy report for senior management regarding a reporting software program and ways to improve the functionality of the reports.

Technical Writing Experience (over 10 years)

Writing software user guides, procedure manuals, on-line help and training users:

• IAG Insurance (NRMA) – worked on a large online help project over a number of years and also prepared glossaries of boat and car terminology.
• Roads and Traffic Authority (IT) – over a number of years produced a user guide for a bridge application, and trained over 50 users in its use.
• State Railways – procedure flowcharts for health and safety guidelines.
• Systemik Solutions – manufacturing procedure documentation and on-line help for some of their in-house applications.
• State Transit Authority – wrote various user guides for a large Oracle system.
• Philips Multimedia Center – a technical newsletter for its CD-i clients.
• Sensible Business Solutions – user guides and online help for identification cards.
• Applied Learning – a user guide for a time management system.
• RR Donnelley – quality assurance flowcharts for their purchasing department.
• AMP Insurance Society – a user guide, on-line help and training material.

Digital Marketing Experience

• • Freelance Marketing Manager: Currently maintaining four counseling websites -  ArdentCenter.com, MidwestCounselingLLC.com, ABCDupage.com and RestartingRelationships.com, adding SEO terms for all pages, creating blogs to target specific terms, monitoring and tracking Google Analytics data.
  • Amrita Aromatherapy (USA): Marketing Manager:
    • Created daily visually appealing and interesting social media posts, boosting when effective to do so.
    • Wrote a weekly blog, created a large number of web pages and blogs about various medical conditions and added HTML code and graphics to pages.
    • Created over ten videos from scratch and converted over ten other videos from Powerpoints into videos, added voiceovers and captioning to increase SEO, substantially increased the number of visitors to the YouTube channel and the number of subscribers.
    • Sent out regular email blasts to thousands of subscribers (both to other businesses and retail clients) and obtained open rates as high as 31.8% (way above the industry average of 16.4%) and click rates as high as 14.1% (industry average of 2.8%).
    • Arranged for Amrita to be mentioned in the press and in blogs (e.g. cheapflights.com/news/flying-with-hangovers/, yourtango.com/2016285080/perfect-gift-for-your-boo-based-on-love-language and jessieonajourney.com/how-to-sleep-on-a-plane/).
    • SEO: Added SEO meta-tags and headings to website pages and blogs (SEMRush.com showed an increase as a result of my work from an initial 28 keywords and 409 traffic to 2,100 keywords and 2,100 traffic).
    • Managed Google Adwords pay per click advertising and advertised in various magazines and blogs. Monitored the impact of my work on sales via Facebook Reports, Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools (increased web traffic by 47.85%, the conversion rate by 71.93% and revenue from online sales by 203% not including discounts).
    • Managed a team of Indian programmers to redo the website and tested their work to ensure our requirements were met. Detected errors in the website’s structure that were causing duplicate content issues and rectified the situation by adding a number of categories to the robots.txt file. Monitored the effectiveness of the website using heatmaps and user recordings.
  • Merrimysteries.com (my own business for over 23 years) – Wrote over 30 mystery party games and sold over 30,000 of them worldwide. Managed all aspects of the business including marketing, social media posts, and Google Adwords ads.

Medical / Writing Experience

• Oxford Clinical Communications – Medical writer – Q&A booklets, guides and research reviews, edited technical newsletters.
• Australian Doctor Magazine – Medical writer – attended conferences and wrote articles on the latest research on topics like colonoscopy, sleep apnea etc.
• C3 Computer Consultants – Ventura documentation for a pharmaceutical client (Merck Sharp & Dohme) and an on-line help system for a government client.
• Standards Australia – Committee Executive Officer – managed 11 technical committees and over 30 projects and presented at national seminars, drafted technical standards and guides on materials and testing.

Other Work

• Wrote two non-fiction books: Earth Garden Books – “Getting Started In The Country” (over 4000 copies sold) and an e-book called “House plans, home builders and dreams”.

Education, Technical Proficiencies & Interests

• Chicago Portfolio School – one year full-time copywriting and art direction course which included numerous Digital Bootcamp – Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Flash, After Effects, and HTML5, CSS and JQuery classes
• Australian Institute of Management – Train the Trainer course
• MUM – 2 months of training in video editing (Final Cut), MA in Professional Writing (partly completed), B.Sc. majoring in Physiology
• Macquarie University – Biology/Psychology (1 year)
• Proficient in the following programs (not already mentioned above): Microsoft Office, Visio, InDesign, Photoshop, Microsoft SQL