2000 WinWriters Salary Survey

A central element of any job we hold is the compensation we receive. While compensation is only one factor in why we accept a position, it's how many of us keep score and the way all of us pay the bills. For many years the Society for Technical Communication (STC) has provided a valuable service by producing a salary survey of technical communicators. However, that survey does not make distinctions based on the specific type of work we do. Over the past decade, the special interest area of Help development has emerged as the driving force in technical communication offering exciting and well-paying jobs in the software industry and corporations in general. The Online Help SIG has grown to be STC's largest special interest group.

WinWriters decided that it was time to take a look specifically at the compensation doled out to Help developers. During a three-week period in late November through early December we accepted responses via a survey on our WinWriters Web site. The final results presented here represent 1,136 responses from people in forty-two states and five Canadian provinces. The Help authoring payroll represented by these respondents is in the neighborhood of $70 million. The links in the gold sidebar take you to an analysis of the eight areas where we identified significant results.

Methodology

One thousand of the responses were from salaried employees and the remaining 136 were from hourly wage earners. The data for the hourly earners is only represented in the "On the Clock" analysis (see Contractor Salary); it's not included in the "Salary" charts.

This study comes with a couple of biases. First, the majority of respondents are most likely customers of WinWriters. Most of the responses came on the heels of email broadcasts we made to our mailing list. However, the WinWriters constituency is large and probably is a fair representation of the overall Help community. The second bias is that only 30 responses were from Canada and just 48 from outside the United States, so this survey effectively only represents the United States.

Salary Range

The annual salaries ranged from $20,000 to $150,000 and fell into the following 25% groupings:

Age

The respondents represent a wide age range with 70% between the ages of 30 and 50. We didn't include a separate analysis of salary by age because it's not a factor that usually goes into salary decisions. But the following data might be useful for personal benchmarks:

Benefits

While the bulk of this survey report focuses on salary, employee benefits can add up to a significant value. We asked the respondents to identify what benefits they receive from their organizations. Most of the salaried respondents enjoy health and dental insurance, as well as 401k plans. To a lesser extent, stock options and educational reimbursements are also prevalent.

In contrast, very few contractors receive benefits. These workers are expected to make up the deficit through the overall higher wage rates that they receive. On average, contractors earn 50% more in wages than salaried employees.