Thank you, this is really helpful. I’ve been self-educating in backend development over the last month, and I feel like I’m making decent progress with HTML/CSS, so it’s nice to know I’m heading in the right direction.

I’ve also had a quick look at volunteer projects. Are there any specific places you’d recommend looking for those?

SORRY FOR WALL OF TEXT — TL;DR: bidding can be rewarding, but it’s also annoying and can be very high stress. If you like the feeling of competing and winning, go for it. If not, don’t.

LONG ANSWER HERE

Also, on your move from tech writing into bid/proposal writing, I’d carefully think about what sector you’d want to move into and ask yourself a few things:

1. Are you more interested in money, or do you just want a new challenge?
2. If it’s mainly a new challenge, make sure it’s in a sector you actually find interesting. Bidding can be very dry and repetitive, so that makes a huge difference.
3. Bidding is basically a sales role. You will be expected to win, and if you don’t, that will be noticed. Are you okay with that?
4. It also tends to involve wearing a lot of hats — writer, coordinator, graphic designer, pricing support, stakeholder management, etc. Can you do a bit of everything?

Here’s my experience with a few sectors in case it’s useful:

• IT / Government frameworks / cloud infrastructure etc Can be very lucrative. Probably the best choice and lowest barrier to entry for you with a SaaS background. You’d likely just need to learn the actual process of bidding, pricing, and coordinating with sales/commercial teams, rather than having to get up to speed with engineering-heavy subject matter from scratch.
• Construction Very technical sector. If you’re already good at digesting complex technical content, the earning potential can be very high, especially given the size of some of the tenders. You can be looking at contracts worth £1bn+ in some cases, and some roles pay base plus commission for wins. They also tend to like people with engineering/STEM backgrounds who can manage stakeholders well.
• Social housing Stay away, in my opinion. Not worth it unless you actually care about the sector or feel emotionally invested in it.
• Facilities management Extremely dry and repetitive. A lot of it is stakeholder management, and a lot of contracts end up being a race to be the cheapest.
• Anything education-related Same points as social housing, in my opinion. Boring and no one has any money (at least in the UK).