Criteria for Being a Grant Writer

Finding money for organiza-tions is a career choice that offers considerable satisfaction; whether private or public, the recipients of grant monies can further projects and endeavors that might otherwise never come to fruition. Along with possessing solid communication, research and writing skills, grant writers are also often required to have a college degree and experience in the industry.

Education
A key ingredient of good grant writing is the ability to persuade, which makes all the difference between mediocre and stellar proposals. According to The Education Portal, earning a degree in areas such as English, journalism, marketing or public relations provides the communication nuts and bolts, and fine-tunes additional techniques that aid in crafting eloquent, engaging proposals.

Specific Course Work
Once you have strong and detailed writing skills, it's time to cultivate a greater understanding of the proposal's specific nature. Knowing the proper format and expectations for each grant application is critical to the final outcome; submissions that do not conform to each funder's unique protocol are often dismissed without consideration. Moreover, The Education Portal points out that grant topics can be individualized to a particular organization, which requires an additional layer of knowledge to maneuver through those conditions. Joining professional grant writing groups provides opportunities to network with others for continued education and job prospects.

Cultivate Experience
Nothing speaks greater volumes about an individual's aptitude than having a track record; it's not unusual for employers to overlook your lack of a degree when your past experience is strong. If you are just starting out and need to build your portfolio, you'd do well to approach smaller organizations that cannot afford to pay a grant writer and offer services pro bono, according to The Grant Adviser website. Steadily continue to move up the ladder and demonstrate diversity in the size of grants you seek and the types of industries. Interning within a desired industry places grant writers directly in the cross-hairs of potentially permanent employers.

Industry Experience
If all of your previous grant writing experience has, for example, been securing monies for a family owned preschool and you're now seeking employment with a Fortune 500 company, it's likely the latter will not consider that level of procurement to be a transferable skill. By the same token, employers prefer to hire grant writers who have a working knowledge of the general industry, if not also specific understanding of how that particular company operates. Fund-raising for a small nonprofit that needs seed money to build a homeless shelter is quite different from securing multimillion-dollar funding for a groundbreaking technological prototype.

Originally written for and published by Demand Media