Hey guys, just thought I’d share a story about pay discrepancy in the two fields I’ve worked in that makes absolutely zero sense to me. Will also preface I’m from Aus so all values are Australian and related to the Aus job market.
I’ve just left my job as a financial writer for a 40+ person company (content team of around 10 people). I enjoyed the job and the company itself was great with a good culture, but the pay was not. Without going into specifics I was on less than $50k salary for 42.5 hour weeks. Granted, I was fresh out of Uni but speaking with other employees, those that had been there for years weren’t making any more than ~$60k. I got the job due to the fact I had 2 University degrees, a major and a minor all related to the field and I was only just making enough to begin mandatory repayments for my student HELP loan, which is absolutely crazy to me.
Flash forward to now and I’m about to begin training for a career in the state fire service, which requires 13 weeks training mon-Friday, similar hours to what I was doing at my writing gig, for which we are paid a training salary before moving to a proper salary while we graduate. The training salary is more than $15k more than I made at my writing job, yet I required no degrees or qualifications other than completing year 12. Yes, I understand that firefighting can be dangerous and physically taxing, and that’s why the salary increases another $10k post-graduation, and more over time if you continue up the ranks, but it is mental to me that my writing job which required all of my qualifications was worth $15k less than just training to become a firefighter. Mental.