Magers’s Journey of Adaptive Career Field
A senior writer journeys through the changing world of writing, shifting job position to another of his writing careers to be secure in life
By Ida Patricia Avila || October 12, 2025
Daniel Magers, image courtesy of LinkedIn
Greater Chicago, IL – senior writer Daniel Magers started off as many role titles of his job as a writer. An academic, publishing company editor, copywriting, and copyediting from his past experienced, which help him to hone his skills as a writer.
Magers received his education from five different institutions. He received his degrees consisting of Bachelor of Arts (B.A), Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.). In the time of his studies to get those degrees, Magers learned English, Philosophy from Loyola University, writing from The New School, English Language, + Literature/Letters from University of Illinois Chicago. He even studies non-writing at Flatiron School where he learned software engineering (JavaScript, React, Rails, SQL).
Magers have many skills experiences, for example, “I had other writing job before I was an editor at a publishing company. I was an academic. I’ve done some copywriting and copyediting”, Magers answered.
From his job as a technical writer, Magers show off a sample from the software company he works for, Anthology Inc. Similar to Blackboard layout site, it’s more of a Blackboard help site with Microsoft contribute in it. He’s responsible for overhauling the instructions, rewriting the information, and for the new tool of the site he’s working on. He wrote twelve different pages from the site.
From how and why he became a technical writer, he explains his situation during his time at UIC. After he finished his studies for Ph.D. program at UIC, he was on the career track to find a secure job; however, the job market was lackluster, leaving him limited options to be secure in life. Instead of worrying about finding a job with limited options from the career track, Magers have to be adaptive in order to thrive in a job market that pays him more money. “Instead of trying to move somewhere else or find a career track in Chicago, which is not many, I decided to go another field that would also pay more money than a lecturer or a 10-year professor,” said Magers giving a logical solution by adapting to a different job field while sticking to the career he’s the most familiar with from his education.
When asked to give advice to those who have negative stance against AI and wishes to adapt around it, Magers give two possible answers, “You shouldn’t be, particularly if you’re staring in your career, over reliant on using AI to do writing. You should be very good at reading, critical thinking, and trying to solve problems in writing on your own” Magers says while he was off track for a moment before his second answer, “The other thing I would say, I do think that students and people starting out need to use it more or get more familiar with it, because it’s just kind of the reality now. It’s not gonna go away,” Magers grimly states the issue.
The company, Anthology Inc., he’s currently working for, has started ordering the employees to use AI for their job to speed up the process to make more profit. It would be the case if everyone stopped using AI after seeing the effects it has on environmental, professions, and people’s crafts. It would be an easier solution to not use AI or keep it at a minimal so it will affect companies who are relying on it to begin to either shift the job tactics or abandoned AI use in their workforce.
Magers’s second answered to the same question doesn’t sound too favorable. Rather it’s his pragmatic thinking or a sense of surrounding to embrace AI into the work field, mainly the creative work field that many suffered from, made it sound like he believes there’s no path to get around AI. There’s no way to adapt out of this, instead he believes assimilation is the only option if he only wants to thrive a little longer.
However, the idea of assimilation of AI can only happen if everyone wasn’t actively fighting against it since AI appeared to take away creativity from creative individuals. The one thing that Magers doesn’t considered is that AI doesn’t feel any sense of joy of completed work nor can’t replicate the human-made struggles into their work. Of course, Magers further states to be not over-reliant on AI despite his second answer since AI won’t be fading away anytime soon in this current predicament. There’s one statement that is confusing to understand when he first said it, “Experts are often the people who can use AI most effectively.” This could be interpreted as someone who lacks skills and talents to do the impossible will most likely rely on AI because it gives them a faster result than a slow-paced process of struggles from people.
Nonetheless, while his advice may seem to be a damper, there is plenty of good advice of building connections to secure a better job position with unlimited options than limited options to those who lacked a secure network to rely on. It was informative to learn things from Daniel Magers, the senior technical writer.