Webinar recap: The 2023 content design & salary survey report

This session was originally recorded via Zoom webinar and transcribed using Sonix.

WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT

Patrick: [00:00:16] Hello, everyone. We’ve got people coming in. Welcome. Welcome on this fine day. Morning, afternoon, evening. Wherever it is you are. You know, one of the good things about a webinar like this is that we have people from all over the world joining us. So if you if you are in, please feel free to say hello and drop where you are in the chat. I’m in Melbourne, Australia, so it’s I’m getting an early start to my day, but I always like seeing who is here and where they’re from. So please, please feel free to say hello and introduce yourself. Super excited for all the results we’re going to share today. We have been putting a lot of time and effort into compiling these results and we’re really excited to to share them with you and give you some information that you can use for your own career, whether that’s in negotiating a current salary or even just comparing yourself against your peers and what they’re doing in their roles. So yeah, super, super excited. We’ll just wait a minute or so because we do have some more people, people coming in.

Katie: [00:01:36] Patrick I was just going to say, folks are saying our chat is disabled. I’m not sure what’s going on with Zoom, so I’m looking into that, but okay. For now. For now, feel free to just drop, Q&A comments there and then I will ping when the chat is live. Sorry about that, y’all.

Patrick: [00:01:53] Okay. Yeah, sorry about that. Thank you, Katie. Um. Yeah, I’m not sure why that’s happening, but that is a shame for everyone. So I do like seeing where people are from, but that’s okay. Um, cool. Well, thank you. We’ll get started as more people come in because we’ll give people a chance to come in. So yes, once again, thank you for joining for the content design salary and industry report. We’re really excited. Before we start talking about the report, just a few housekeeping things. This session is being recorded, so we are going to share the recording afterwards. So just letting you be aware of that. You are able to turn on captions as we’ve just discussed. Once we get the chat up and running, then then you’ll be able to ask questions and we will share, we will share this session afterwards as well. So, um, yeah, we’ll get that chat working as soon as we can. Um, we do have the Q&A though, so feel free to drop questions there. We’re going to cover a lot today, and one of the reasons we’re so excited about this survey is that, you know, a few years ago we did our first salary survey in 2019, we just focused on salaries. And so we wanted to understand that basic aspect of the role. But it’s been a few years since that one.

Patrick: [00:03:33] It’s been a few years in the industry has developed in that time. And we wanted to understand not just salaries and compensation, but we also wanted to understand more of the context that goes into the role. Because it’s not just salary, right? It’s there’s a whole lot of information that you can use to understand what your role is like in comparison to your peers and what goes into deciding a particular compensation rate. And so it’s not necessarily just enough to say this is what content designers are earning. We also have to say, well, what are they doing in that role? And so in our survey, we asked everyone about a number of different topics. So we asked about total compensation, including bonuses and stock. We talked, we asked about job titles and years of experience. And we also asked people who are your top collaborators and projects? Who are you working with the most? And one of the most interesting findings in the survey has been seeing not only what those are, but how those change over time. So if you have more experience or perhaps less experience, how does that change who you’re working with, the number of projects you’re working on and other aspects of the role as well? We also asked people about their biggest challenges and joys. So what do they love about the role and what are some of the biggest challenges that people are facing in the role? We also asked about freelance rates.

Patrick: [00:05:14] So if you’re a freelancer, we’ve got some key information here. And then at the end, we’re going to talk about this tool that we’ve created to help compare your stats with others. We’re actually really excited about this and we’ve put a lot of work into it, a lot of hours, and we think that this is going to be a pretty significant tool to help you understand your current situation. We’ll just get started here. So just a little bit about the survey. We have over 550 respondents in 40 different countries. So it’s a pretty wide-ranging survey. There’s a lot of different information worldwide. And of course, that means that sometimes we have to be careful with our data, which we’ll go into. And as I just mentioned, we’ve got seven major topics. So compensation and beyond. So let’s get started. So the first aspect of the survey we looked at was overall compensation. So different salary ranges. And one of the reasons we asked about salary ranges rather than specific aspects of salary is that when you apply for a role, or you are in negotiation, a lot of the time you’re working within a range, you’re not necessarily working within a set figure. So we wanted to match that approach and we had some pretty significant figures here. So worldwide, the median salary range is USD, so in US dollars $81,000 to $100,000.

Patrick: [00:07:00] Now that’s worldwide. And so obviously it’s a little hard to compare the different salaries worldwide. So we wanted to give just one answer for worldwide, but then we break it down into different countries as well. And one of the big findings we found is that the United States leads with the USD 121,000 to 140,000. Now that makes sense. A lot of content designers are located in the United States and of course, you have areas like Silicon Valley and San Francisco and California where that number is putting things towards the higher range. But one of the interesting findings is that you can find in the survey we found that you can find high salaries and high overall compensation rates everywhere in the world. So you don’t have to go to the United States to find people who are earning that much. In fact, the highest reported salary that we had in the survey was over $400,000 US and that person was actually located in Europe. So there are all sorts of high salaries everywhere in the world. It’s not just located in one country. So to me, I think this gives the message that content design continues to be a well-paying role in multiple countries and different areas, even though depending on where you live, it may change based on where you are.

Katie: [00:08:30] Just to jump in really quick. Yes, absolutely. Apologize, Zoom. So the chat defaults I refreshed on my side, but it might just take a minute and I apologize. I think the settings defaulted to turn chat off. I’m not sure why that happened. So thank you all for your patience there and keep sending your questions in the Q&A function.

Patrick: [00:08:53] Thank you. Okay. Yes, Thank you, Katie. So, yes, we’re sorry about that. So if you do have a question, please feel free to drop in Q&A. We just don’t have the group chat. So do apologize. But yes, if you do have questions, please drop them there and we will answer as we go. So, yes, compensation. So the median salary range worldwide, 81,000 to 100,000. The United States leading with the highest median range and then the highest reported salary we found was over 400,000 US. But what we’ve also done is we’ve looked at countries with over with at least 20 respondents in each. And we looked at the median salary ranges for those countries and we’ve put them here. So you can see that we have five areas United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Israel, and Australia. And we’ve noted the median salary ranges for those countries. So a great question we’ve already got in the Q&A is how do you work out the relative salaries according to the economic situation of each country? So what we’ve actually asked people to do is to convert their salary to USD. So in our survey, we linked to a calculator and we said, please convert your salary in your local currency to US dollars. So that’s how we were able to get an equivalence across all the different answers. So in this so in this slide, we’re seeing that the United States is leading their 120 to 140.

Patrick: [00:10:33] Then we have United Kingdom, Israel, and Australia at a similar rate of 80 to 100,000 US. And then Canada is at the lowest there at 60,000 to 80,000. Now we do have a landing page that we will link to where we actually have much more information about different locations and how that breaks down and you’ll be able to explore that. For now, we’re just sort of looking at some of the top highlights and so we will link to a landing page later where you’ll be able to delve into other areas. For example, we’ve combined data for the EU, the European Union, and so if you live in the EU, you’ll be able to look at information there about your median salary range because we have more than 20 respondents for the EU as a whole. So overall, a pretty healthy-looking salary range here for content designers worldwide depending on where you live. But you might look at some of those results and think, well, you know, maybe Canada is a little bit low. But one thing to consider is that we also ask people about different types of compensation they receive. So not just about their base salary, but also about do you receive stock options, do you receive any type of bonus? And what was really fascinating to see was that a lot of content designers received this type of compensation. So they receive bonuses, they receive stock options now depending whether depending where you live.

Patrick: [00:12:06] We’ve got a great question here. Have you taken into consideration whether respondents were full-time employees versus contractors? From my experience, contractors get paid a higher salary, but that compensates them for not receiving benefits like full-time employees. So we have asked people, are you an employee or are you a freelancer? So we did ask people if they’re an employee and they did indicate whether they are a contractor. But to answer your question, that’s why we actually asked about these other benefits as well, because you’re quite right, it’s not just about salary. It’s about the total compensation package. And so it was really interesting to find that the majority of content designers worldwide actually do receive some type of extra benefits, such as stock options. So the majority here receive some type of stock options of that majority. Most receive RSAs restricted stock units, which is stock paid for by the company and then discounted stock options. So they get the option to actually buy stock at a discounted rate. And then we have a lot of other people here who have who don’t have the ability to buy stock. So this is actually quite common in areas such as Silicon Valley where if you’re working at a larger tech. But not but not all. So it’s not necessarily the case that you have to work at a big tech company to get this type of stock option.

Patrick: [00:13:39] The other question we asked is about overall benefits. So we ask people, you know, when you went into a role, what did you negotiate for? Did you actually negotiate for anything? What were you able to work with? And this was really important to ask, we think, because a lot of the time content designers are perhaps I wouldn’t say afraid, but maybe a little bit hesitant to negotiate just like anyone in any role because you think that maybe if I negotiate, then I’m not going to I’m not necessarily going to get a higher salary. But actually, we ask people, if you did negotiate, what did you receive? And we got some pretty interesting results here. So 40% of people said they didn’t negotiate when they got an offer. But as you can see here, there were a lot of options that people negotiated for that they were successful in. So there was about just over 10% of people negotiated for a hiring bonus. Equity options. The scope of the role or job title was another popular one, vacation time, and then annual bonus down the bottom. Now, what was interesting to us is that this option here where people said I negotiated but I wasn’t successful. Right. So that’s a shame. But at least they tried. But what was interesting to find is that of the majority of people who did negotiate, they were successful.

Patrick: [00:15:16] So to us, this was a really interesting finding to share because it shows that if you do negotiate, the statistics tell us that you will be negotiating, you will be successful in achieving something. You may not necessarily get all of you all of what you want. And of course, it depends on your individual situation. But based on the statistics here, the 40% of people who didn’t negotiate the statistics tell us that you should actually give it a go because the chances are that you’ll probably be successful. Now, we did also ask about bonuses, and we also found that the majority of, or excuse me, just under a majority of content designers received some type of bonus. Now we have details of that on the landing page, which we’ll link to at the end. So you’ll be able to go and explore that. But it’s interesting to see that people receive bonuses. For the majority of people, that bonus is based on performance. So if you meet expectations or you exceed expectations and there’s a whole different range of bonuses available. So we will link to that later on. So I’ll just look at the questions and see if anyone has asked anything. Did you happen to collect more data among those that did not negotiate? Mainly, was this because the majority of respondents are or identify as women? We actually haven’t cross-referenced that data, but that would be an interesting analysis to do.

Patrick: [00:16:49] And in fact, that’s probably something we’ll do as a fast follow. I suspect that there are a lot of reasons why people don’t negotiate and so it would be interesting to delve into that. So that’s probably something to look at there. One of the reasons we wanted to give this data is just to let you know that even if you feel like you’re not in a position to negotiate, hopefully this at least gives you a little bit of confidence to try. So moving on. So we also asked people about years of experience and titles because it’s not just enough to say, oh, you know, this is your salary range, this is your expected bonus, this is what you can expect if you get this particular role. We wanted to ask people about their own situation because obviously you want to know that as you gain seniority, you’ll also earn more money, right? So we did find that worldwide content designers with ten-plus years of experience earn between us 121,000 and 140,000. But what was interesting to see is that when you break down into different locations, this as you gain seniority, your median salary continues to increase. So it’s just good. It’s a good thing to know that as you’re in this role, if you’re wanting to earn more, you it’s good to know that the longer you stay in the industry, then the more likely it is that you will continue to earn more.

Patrick: [00:18:21] And what was very interesting compared to our last survey is that the most common title in the survey was content designer. So a few years ago when we asked people the most common title was UX writer. Now UX writer is still a popular title. It’s still the second most common title. But among our respondents, content designer was the most popular title. I think we’ve all seen that change happen over the past few years, and it seems like the industry has really consolidated around that title and this is a pretty good indicator that that has continued to occur. So this is the information here on median salary ranges based on seniority. And you can see that among those who have less than one year’s experience. So very entry level, the median salary worldwide is 80 to 100. And then as you continue through your career, that number increases. Now, again, this is median and it’s worldwide. So it will obviously differ based on where you live and we’ve broken that down more so on our landing page, which we’ll link to, but it’s just a good indicator. And then it tells you that as you gain seniority, you can expect to earn more. Here’s just a pie chart based on the titles we asked people about.

Patrick: [00:19:45] So you can see here that content designer is the most common title followed by UX writer. So there’s still a lot of people calling themselves UX writers. And then content strategist is one of the least common titles. Then we had a smattering of other titles. There are still some areas which use digital copywriter. For instance, there were some technical writers who indicated that they actually do a lot of UX writing as well. So but yeah, content designer is definitely the most common. A question: is that a full ten plus years experience specifically within content design? Yes. This survey was specifically about content design. Oh, I’m sorry. I think what you might be asking is, does that seniority relate to people who call themselves content designer? No, we looked at everyone. But what we did ask people is we asked people, what is it that you do in your role? And so that indicated to us like what type of work they were doing. And so we’ve analyzed people who actually work in content design but may call themselves other things. Um, just looking at the questions here, uh, is there any info about external hire versus an internal move, particularly with negotiations? I feel like internal hires are less likely to try negotiating and tend to be unsuccessful when they try. Um, thank you for that question.

Patrick: [00:21:15] We didn’t ask people specifically about that. I, I think you’re right. I think you’re correct that you’re more likely to be successful when applying for a new role as apply as opposed to negotiating internally. But I think the stats show that even if you are, even if that’s the case it’s still at least worth trying, especially if you’re going after a title change or something like that. Um, okay. So, so moving on to our next question that we ask people, one of the things we wanted to know is among, among content designers, who are you working with the most? Because it’s all well and good to call yourself a content designer, but we wanted to understand who are you talking to the most? Who are you interacting with the most? And how can that tell you what you need to know As a content designer? What skills do you need to develop? And we found that among content designers, the people who they’re spending time with the most are product designers, product managers, and other content designers. So that makes sense, right? So to me it seems that if you’re a content designer, you’re a part of a UX or a product team, it makes sense that you would be dealing with these people. And so to me that just indicates that you need to spend time understanding what these people need, what their expertise is in, what their challenges are, and just get to know them better.

Patrick: [00:22:47] Right. But again, that’s worldwide. What was really interesting to see is how your collaborators change as you get more experience. So we asked, who are you collaborating with at, you know, one year’s experience or three years experience and then who are you collaborating with at ten years experience? And we actually found some pretty interesting results. So for example, in some areas. Those who have less than one year experience or at the beginning of a role are spending more time with product designers. But as you get ten-plus years experience, you’re spending more time with people like UX researchers. And I thought that was really fascinating. And it makes sense because as you gain seniority, you need to be able to demonstrate impact and ROI, and you’re more likely to do that if you’re working with researchers and testing your content. So that was a really fascinating finding and we’ve broken that down in more detail on the landing page. And we also asked about how many designers are you supporting? Because we wanted to know who’s overstretched, you know, what’s the median number of projects or designers that people are supporting. And we found that most content designers are supporting 3 to 5 designers or projects. It was really interesting to see how many projects people are supporting. We had some people for whom I feel very sorry who were supporting over 16 designers or projects.

Patrick: [00:24:22] I don’t know how they do it. And we also had a lot of results around. Are people doing ad hoc requests as well? And we do break that down on the actual page. But it was interesting to see that the median is really 3 to 5. So if you’re looking if you’re supporting, say, ten designers or projects, that’s a good indicator to you that you’re actually doing a lot more than the median content designer. So you can see here, this is again, this is just overall stats. It’s not individualized. Product managers were the most common top collaborators, followed by other content designers, UX researchers, front-end developers were up there, support, help, writers, translators, marketers, and technical writers were down at the bottom of the list. That was interesting to see not a lot of collaboration going on there. And just to clarify, the information we’re looking at in this particular chart is among those who listed these particular roles as a top collaborator. So we asked people, do you collaborate with these people a little, maybe half the time, or a lot. And so these are the most common top collaborators. So again, we do break this down into more detail based on people’s individual situations on the page, which we’ll link to. So one of the biggest things that we wanted to ask about was what are the biggest challenges and joys of the role? Because as we all know in content design, there are a lot of challenges that we face and there’s also a lot of things that we love.

Patrick: [00:26:08] But we wanted to actually ask people, you know, we hear a lot of the time that we hear a lot of common challenges in content design, which is actually, you know, getting in the room or not necessarily being able to demonstrate the impact of content design. So we wanted to ask people, what are your biggest challenges? And if you had guessed, you know, lack of influence or not being in the room, then this survey actually proves, I think, what we all suspected. We asked people, What are your biggest challenges? And the top three were not being in meetings, lack of influence and supporting too many projects. I’m just looking at a question here: were product designers not primary collaborators? They definitely were. I need to update the chart, so I do apologize on that. Product designers were absolutely top collaborators. I just need to include that on the bar chart there. But in terms of biggest challenges not being in meetings, lack of influence, and supporting too many projects were some common problems. Now it’s interesting to see that among people who we ask people, you know, the number of projects you’re supporting, the median is 3 to 5.

Patrick: [00:27:28] And yet one of the big challenges here is supporting too many projects. I think what the data is telling us is that a lot of content designers are really expected to do it all and they’re expected to do it all without a lot of influence necessarily in other areas of the organization. So hopefully, even though this data might be a little bit confronting in terms of showing, you know, what people might be going with, hopefully it makes you feel a little bit less alone in your role if you’re feeling like you’re not being not getting into meetings, you don’t necessarily have influence. At least you know that there are others in the industry that are experiencing the same thing. But on the plus side, we asked people as well, you know, what are your biggest joys of the role? What do you love most? And people said that they love crafting experiences with words and solving complex problems. And I thought these were really fantastic results and I was really heartened to see them because it really does show that for people who love language and love exploring user behavior with language and words, that is a really great job for you. You know, you’re where you’re supposed to be. Even though you’re facing these challenges, you’re still getting so much out of the role and you’re still getting a lot of personal satisfaction.

Patrick: [00:28:57] So I thought it was a really fascinating look into what people really love, really love about the roles. So we’ve broken down the most common response I see here for the biggest challenges. So you can see here, you know, not included in important meetings is among the highest. They’re supporting too many designers or projects, pushback from stakeholders, lack of influence. Interestingly, just under 30% of people said their biggest issue was too much energy spent explaining the role. And that was an interesting one we found. But you know what was very interesting to see is that about 14%, 15% of people said that they would love a pay increase, which was actually less than I thought it would be. So it does indicate that for many people, they feel as though they’re being paid well enough to do the role. Obviously no one turns down a pay rise, but it’s interesting to see that among the challenges that’s not the highest of the list. And it was also good to see that the lack of work-life balance is not as common an issue as some others in the list. So that was actually heartening to see. The biggest joys of the role. So what did people say they loved? And we’ve mentioned crafting experiences with words, solving complex problems, collaborating with lots of people, helping humans use technology, and getting paid to do work.

Patrick: [00:30:33] 34% of people said they love getting paid to do a job that they love, which to me indicates that there are a lot of people in this role who just love being there and they feel like they’re making a difference, which is really great. I thought it was interesting that the least common cited benefit of the role was teaching others UX writing because I think content designers love teaching others. And it was just interesting to see that, that that was among the least favorite of the role. But it does tie in with one of the complaints we found, which was that there are people in content design who don’t necessarily love spending time explaining their role. So having to spend time explaining what is UX writing, what are they doing, how are they making an impact. They can actually find that quite, quite draining. So that was interesting. Interesting to see. So those are just the top-line industry results. We actually have a full landing page where we break down everything in detail. Now, we were going to drop that into the chat, but that may still not be working. Katie, is there a way we might be able to send people the link, direct message people? Or could that be a little bit of an issue?

Katie: [00:32:10] Yeah. Let me see. I’m so sorry about the chat. Don’t know. Zoom. Zoom is not on our side.

Patrick: [00:32:17] Oh, good. We’ll try and get that. We’ll try and get that link into the chat. But before we do, I wanted to if even if we can’t get it into the chat, we will definitely email everyone afterwards and let you know. If you go to ux content dot com, the link is actually in the footer as well. So we’re sorry, we’re not able to give the link directly right now. We wanted to go deeper than just the top-line results because it’s interesting to see, you know, general results for everyone, but for your individual situation, it doesn’t necessarily help you to see top-line results because you want to see something that’s closer to what you’re experiencing. So we’re really excited to announce that we’ve created a custom salary and career survey tool. So what we’ve done is we’ve taken all the statistics from the survey and we’ve created these reports, and these reports allow you to compare your compensation with others in your demographic. So your salary range, bonuses, stock compensation, you can see among people with your stats who are the top collaborators, what are the biggest challenges and how does that change? And then what we do is we compare your statistics against those in the same demographic but with more experience. So you’re able to see the differences between where you are in your career versus where you might be in a few years’ time.

Patrick: [00:34:05] And as I mentioned, the data breakdown changes based on seniority. So you can get this custom report which shows you how your collaborators change over time. How does your salary range change over time based on your demographic? Should you be expecting some type of bonus or stock compensation? Your biggest challenge is what are they likely to change as you get more experience? So we’ve reviewed every demographic basically, and we’ve looked at the key areas here where we can show you against your peers and then the people with more experience. And this is free. So if you go to the landing page, which is now being sent around, I believe Katie might be DMing people with the custom link. If you want to just go now, you can go to the footer of uxcontent.com and click on 2023 content design salary and industry survey. You can actually get your custom reports. So we ask you, you know, where do you live? How much experience do you have? How do you identify, are you employed, are you a freelancer? And we ask about whether you’re a manager or you might want to be a manager. And so we give you data from our survey based on those results. And we think they’ll be extremely useful for you. So really encourage you to go and check that out. So we have some more questions. So if you do have any questions, please feel free to drop them into the chat. Here’s one. Patrick, do you have any high-level thoughts on what could be driving some of the top content challenges? Yeah, I mean, to be honest, the challenges that came through at the highest level are ones that I think we expected to see because we hear so many content designers talk about this pretty often. Not being able to have as much influence as they would like and not being able necessarily to get into the rooms or the meetings that they like that they want to. I have a few thoughts. None of these are original thoughts. People have covered them, covered them elsewhere. But for a lot of content designers, content design is a specialization and it’s something that a lot of people in an organization might not understand. And if they don’t understand it and they don’t understand the impact of it, they’re not necessarily going to understand why it’s important for the content designer to be involved in the design process or the product process. And so to me, that shows why we’re seeing people say that my lack of influence and inability to get into a room is an issue. So the question really, I think is how do we overcome that and how do we as content designers start getting into those rooms and start making sure that we do have influence? And to me, that comes down to the concept of content leadership.

Patrick: [00:37:25] How do we make sure that we’re leading in our organizations and creating that influence? And there are a lot of different resources online for that. We actually have an upcoming content leadership course that will be taught by Connie Wu, who is the director of product writing and content design at TikTok. We have that coming up later in the year. So, we’re trying to help people with that. There are other organizations and conferences helping there. But I think that’s what’s driving some of the common challenges. One question asked whether respondents, all native English speakers or whether people with English as a second language. We didn’t explicitly ask about whether English was their first or second language, but I can guarantee that there will be people who are answering the salary survey where English is a second language, purely based on where they’re located. So I can only assume that we have many people who are answering the survey where English is not a second language. The majority of respondents came from outside the United States. We had a significant number of people answering the questions in Europe, for instance, and we had responses in every continent, including several countries in Africa.

Patrick: [00:38:49] So I can only expect that there will be a number of people answering who have English as a second language. A good question about the request form on the page for my experience level section of the custom report request form. Are you asking for experience as a content designer specifically, or total professional working experience? Great question and we’ll update that. To make that note, we are asking about your content design experience specifically. So not necessarily your overall working career, like you may have 20 years of professional experience, but only five years in content design. So we’re just asking about your time in content design there. So great question. Thank you for asking that. Can you share any more info about the respondent with the highest salary? Were, are they a contractor or a staffer? They indicate we don’t know whether they were a contractor. Um, but, uh, excuse me. I do. I don’t know whether they were a contractor, but I do know that they were employed full-time, so we didn’t ask that specifically of people. But it was interesting to me that the highest salary we found was actually outside of the United States. So it does indicate that there’s lots of opportunity there for people outside the United States as well. Have you taken into consideration content designers who are also copywriters, people who share roles, for example, 60% UX writing and 40% copywriting? Yeah, great question.

Patrick: [00:40:23] So when we ask people about their top collaborators, that is where we gain that information about what their role is like. And one of the collaborators we asked about was marketers. So if you are doing a lot of copywriting, you are probably more likely to be dealing with marketers as a top collaborator. But it was interesting to see that even with that information overall, content designers are working a lot with PMS and product designers. So among the people who answered the survey, the number of people who cited marketers as a top collaborator was a minority. So we do include that information. But it does indicate that the majority of content designers are working with, I guess you would say, traditional members of a product team. Did the survey include salary insights between startups and big tech firms? No, it did not. We didn’t ask people whether they worked at a startup or a big firm. We did have an area where people were able to give qualitative feedback and so we did. Receive some comments about their experiences. For example, at a startup or a larger, a larger, a larger firm. I can give you my experience based on anecdotal data, which is to say that for people at a startup, they probably more likely to be working with more designers and projects and they’re more likely to have salaries that are, I would probably say, around the median level, but not higher.

Patrick: [00:42:13] But again, that really differs based on where you go and what industry. So, no, we didn’t ask that. We wanted to give people a broader range, to give people as much negotiating room as possible. Any plans on doing this survey annually? Annually would be interesting to see how the results change over time. For example, will change who we collaborate with and did the tech layoffs change how we get compensated? Yeah, both excellent questions. We do plan on doing this salary survey annually, so we do want to come back next year and ask people how this changed and then view over time. So yes, we absolutely do want to do that. Regarding the layoffs and affecting compensation, we actually sent this survey out in February of this year. So even though we have seen some more layoffs in the tech industry within the past week or so, we sent this survey out after the majority of those wide-ranging layoffs had occurred. So we feel the survey data is pretty up to date. Of course, things always change. It’s all the more reason why we’ll continue to do this annually. Do you have any thoughts about the shifting trend from UX writer to content designer? As someone currently searching for roles, I find that content designer is not that common in search results and generally returns roles for product designers.

Patrick: [00:43:46] Yeah, so good question. I think that the shift to content designer has really been helped by some of the larger organizations adopting the term, particularly in a company like Meta, where they renamed their entire, I can’t remember what it was before, maybe it was content strategy. They renamed their content strategy team to content design. And so I really think that’s helped the industry consolidate around that particular role. It makes sense because content design is part of a design team. And so I think the term UX writer indicates that maybe, perhaps wasn’t giving it the implication it needed in order to be as part of a design team. So I think that’s why, in terms of searching for roles, I’m not sure where you’re located and so I can’t really give advice to that. But one of the things that you might experience right now is that for content design roles, there has been a slight, uh, drop in the number of roles that are available right now, just as companies are not necessarily hiring as much as they were a year ago. But I would say continue to search regularly. Search alerts on LinkedIn are a really good tool. There are more jobs being posted all the time.

Patrick: [00:45:19] In fact, I actually think there are more jobs being posted now for content design than maybe there were a few months ago, and I have no data on that. That’s just my own anecdotal experience and based on what people are posting on LinkedIn. But I’ve seen roles at places like Netflix, Robinhood. We have our jobs newsletter, which we send out, and there was there are a whole lot of open roles that we’re finding in different areas. So I would say keep searching. But in terms of the shifting, there are still jobs listed as UX writer. So please absolutely continue to search for UX writing roles because as our survey shows there are a lot of people who are called a UX writer. So great question. Someone says not a question. I just wanted to say I got my custom report and I already see valuable takeaways. So thanks a lot. Fantastic. I’m really glad to hear that. You know, we made these reports with the idea that we could give people valuable information about their specific area. Now it’s all well and good to get total overall views but to get specific information about your situation I think is super valuable. So that’s really great. Next question. Why do you think content designers tend to get laid off more readily than product designers? Good question. I don’t know actually if that’s the case.

Patrick: [00:46:54] If that is the case, I suspect it’s probably because, for a lot of content designers, they might struggle to show the value of their contributions. And when unfortunately, whether we like it or not in an organization, it comes down to the impact and the benefit you’re actually able to demonstrate from a financial perspective. So I think for a lot of content designers, that’s a challenge. And when a company is making cuts, it can be an easy target. And so that makes it all the more necessary to be able to demonstrate the type of results that you get. So yeah, I think that’s in terms of whether that happens more often than product designers, I’m not sure. But again, I think it’s all the more reason for you as a content designer to go into your role, really delve in work with product managers and other people to really demonstrate the value of content design. I’d be interested to see the information on product designers versus content designers and layoffs. Just got a couple more questions, particularly around … we had one question about how do you think the salaries compared to other positions in design? I think they are pretty similar. I haven’t reviewed the latest data around actual design roles, but I would suspect that they’re pretty similar.

Patrick: [00:48:35] And I do know that in a lot of companies, they put designers and content designers in the same salary bands. And so what I would be suggesting for content design is that’s a good benchmark for you. How many product managers were angry that UX writers started taking over their writing roles? Uh, interesting question. We didn’t ask about that. I think that the more people who know content design skills, the better. I don’t think anyone’s angry that the writing is getting taken over. But, you know, the survey showed that PMS are the top collaborators with content designers. And so as a content designer, it’s really useful for you to be able to understand what a product manager does. What are their biggest challenges? How can you help them? I think that’s one of the big takeaways that you can take from the report and the survey is to actually understand what it is they do. They do so much and how you can help them. We just got one final question and then I think we’ll end it there. Thank you everyone for attending. I think we’ve had an awesome chat here. Are the majority of the content designers working at companies where the money is such as tech companies, banks, and insurance or other industries investing in this area?

Patrick: [00:50:02] Yeah, great question. We didn’t ask specifically about the industries that people work in, but I can tell you that one of the biggest changes in the industry over the past few years has been more companies outside the traditional tech firms investing in content design and investing in UX writing. So even though we didn’t ask that explicitly in this survey, we do know that there are more companies opting for those types of roles. So, for instance, because every company is essentially creating software, right? And whether that’s online portals or apps and desktop apps, there are more opportunities than ever before. And you don’t have to be at a big tech firm to get a good role as a content designer. So even in firms that you may not necessarily associate with software. For instance, a company like Vanguard, which is an investment company, they’re hiring content designers because they have these online portals that they need work on. So there are lots of jobs like that on LinkedIn. So I would definitely encourage you to go out there and check those out. That brings us to the end of our webinar today. Thank you so much for joining. I think we’ve been messaging everyone the link to the landing page.

Katie: [00:51:25] I don’t know if it’s getting through to people. Oh Zoom.

Patrick: [00:51:29] Oh, good. No problem. That’s fine. Thank you everyone for joining. We will email everyone. And if you want to get a head start on your salary report, you can go to uxcontent.com and check the link in the footer. So yeah, really excited for you to test the report out. If you have any other questions, please email us info@content.com. Happy to answer anything and thank you so much for joining. We’ll see you all again soon.