Salary Survey

March 2018

Money_article

Thanks to the 174 TechCommNZ members and non-members who took the opportunity to complete the TechCommNZ Annual Salary Survey. Steve Moss, former TechCommNZ President, has kindly collated the raw data for us. The full survey is only available to TechCommNZ members, who need to log in to the site to access the Member Area and Survey.

Here are a few of the key survey findings:

  • Salaries are increasing! Respondents’ salaries have been slowly increasing since 2010. In our most recent survey (December 2017 to January 2018) 30.1% of respondents were earning over $90,000. In the 2017 results, slightly more respondents are earning over $100,000 per yer compared to 2016. This is a significant increase from the 2010 survey, when only 14.5% of respondents were earning over $90,000 per year.
  • We’re growing as an industry! The number of technical communicators with less than three years’ experience is on the rise – suggesting that more new people are joining the industry than ever before.
  • We’re modernising! The four most common types of work showed a slight trend towards maintaining web pages and away from paper-based documentation.
  • We’ve fewer freelancers. Full-time and part-time salaried staff predominate while contract and self-employed technical communicators are on the decline.
  • Our most useful tools are… The most popular core tool for creating content was Author-it (and its related products), followed closely by Microsoft Office, while the most popular utility tool was Adobe Acrobat. The most important social media tools are LinkedIn and Facebook.

Supervisory roles in technical communication

A new question was added this year to determine how many respondents were in a supervisory or management role.

  • 82.1% said they were team members or sole traders and not in a supervisory role.
  • 5.2% (9 respondents) said they had one person reporting directly to them.
  • 11.5% (20 respondents) said they had between 2-10 people reporting to them.
  • Only one respondent had more than 10 people reporting to them.

As there were only 24 full-time salaried respondents in a supervisory role, the results are only indicative. But there appears to be a clear difference in salaries between those in supervisory roles and the 108 full-time salaried respondents who were not in a supervisory role.

Almost 60% of respondents in a supervisory role were earning $90,000 or more compared to 25% in non-supervisory roles.

Read the full results

The full survey includes salary and hourly rate ranges and other interesting statistics. Members can view it in the Member Area TechCommNZ Surveys Salary Survey section of our site . You'll need to log in first.

Katie Haggath