From the President

March 2016

Hi everyone, welcome to the Salary Survey Results edition of TechCommWire. I have some great news lined up to share – read on!

Auckland branch coordination team

Firstly, it was lovely to hear from Abhay Chokshi, of Orion, who recently volunteered to run branch events in Auckland this year. He is getting a small team together to help him - and is keen to hear from anyone else who wants to get involved. Email auckland@techcomm.nz. Maybe this is your year of presenting to your colleagues!

You can find out more about Abhay in this edition of TechCommWire - he is our featured Technical Communicator this month.

Education survey

We had a fantastic response to the Education Survey – respondees, we thank you. We now have clear guidance on what people want the most in 2016.

We've lined up the popular Dave Gash to present three webinars, with the first – Practical HTML5/CSS3 for Real Writers – on 31 March. In May, Dave will also be presenting on web fonts, including how to implement them, and in July, he'll be telling us all about markdown (a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers).

We're in talks with other speakers too, so there will be more news on this front soon.

Congratulations to Stephanie Hacksley, who won the Prezzy Card.

Salary survey

The TechCommNZ salary survey is the only comprehensive review of remuneration for technical communication professionals in New Zealand. The results from the survey help us to understand how our salary compares to others. Knowing your worth (and having proof) is important, and gives you an advantage when negotiating a salary review or a new job, or when considering a career move.

A big thank you to Denise Grealish for giving her own time to collate and analyse the raw data for us. Without volunteers like Denise we wouldn’t be able to provide valuable services like this to the TC community.

I have to say that I’m not surprised to see that more of us are working longer hours, as demand has stayed strong for skilled staff in New Zealand. It’s good to see that people are being rewarded for all that hard work with more receiving a pay increase (67%) in 2015 than in previous years. Also, the continued importance of online and mobile-friendly documentation reflected in the survey reminds us that we need to be keeping up with the latest in the online world. And as I mentioned earlier, we’ll be bringing you some handy workshops and webinars this year that will tackle some of these topics.

If you’re not already a TechCommNZ member, the salary survey is another great reason to join us. As a member you have exclusive access to the report from this survey, as well as previous salary reports.

That's it from me – until April – keep Marching on!