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Andrew writes:
> A company's willingness to pay a certain salary generally hinges on their
> need, their perception of value, and previous experience. A company that
> values technical writers and perceives them as a critical part of the
> company is naturally going to pay more than a place that considers tech
> writers glorified secretaries.
My question is how do we find ways to educate hiring managers about our
real
value to the company?
In addition, if hiring managers do not perceive our value as technical
writers, how can we ever convince them of our value when we go beyond the
traditional responsibilities of technical writing?
For example, I'm developing a company Intranet, Oracle database, Java
applications, in addition to providing project management, graphic design,
and tech writing skills. However, the hiring manager on Friday gave me a
*generous* offer of 1/2 my current contract salary (which is $7/hr lower
than the usual rate I charge for tech writing services alone) to continue as
a permanent employee with the company-and I have no option for continuing as
a contractor. With this new position, I'll also two new responsibilities--
managing 4 people and designing and implementing a configuration management
solution.
This manager refers to the group of programmers that work for the company
and make 20K more than my contract salary as "techies" because they have
programming-related degrees (they are writing basic Perl scripts to run an
application); however, he doesn't place value on my "techie" work because my
degree is in Tech Comm. I've also had a hiring manager from another company
say that "any tech writer could go in and perform the tasks that I currently
am, though they probably wouldn't do it quite as well" which seems to
suggest that any attempts we make to extend our skills will not increase our
financial worth or our perceived value.
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