Probably the best advice for a new office temp is to take as many entry-level assignments as possible, maximizing your current skills. Get inside a firm and look at everything. And try as many different fields as possible. Different industries make different uses of office automation. High-volume users include insurance, law, and real estate firms; advertising agencies, securities and health-care companies, and banks. Often, you can learn on the job. You can also register with a temporary service that provides free training to temps who work a specific number of hours for them.
Typing is an old, reliable standby skill. Of course, if you haven't been in an office for over ten years, you will still experience a wave of shock at how this old friend has been modernized. There are both electric and electronic type writers. Most people are familiar with the electric models. Electronic type writers are the step before the word processor. It is a machine with a shorter memory than a word processor; thus, it generally can only store information ranging from one line to several pages of text, while word processing systems are capable of storing hundreds of pages at one time. An electronic typewriter can, however, automatically handle tabulations, margins, centering, underlining, and erasures at the touch of a key.
Our Office Salary Survey
How do you know you are getting paid what you are worth? Your newspaper classifieds are one of your best resources. Don't just check ads under "Temporary Help"; review columns such as Accounting, Administrative Assistant, Clerical, Computer, Gal/Guy Friday, Secretary, Typist and Word Processing.
Ads for permanent jobs can help you compute a fair market hourly rate, and of course, you'll want to check out what a variety of temporary services are offering to pay. Our informal survey of temporary services around the country revealed the typical hourly rate ranges shown in the accompanying table.
It is important that you understand several key points about your pay rate. First, it is typical for a service to start you out at the low end of the rate range when you are a new employee. Since you are an unproven entity, a temp service will want feedback from its clients on your job performance. Second, different assignments pay different rates. You can make $9.50 per hour one week and drop to $9.25 per hour the next week. The temp service pays you based on what they are billing the client. Third, once you master a new skill, don't expect to jump to a much higher pay rate immediately. Client companies may be reluctant to let a newly trained operator test the waters on their premises. Your temp service may market you to their client as an entry-level or junior operator so you can build up several assignments of hands-on experience. Experience and skills are the keys to a bigger paycheck. Finally, if you are sent to a company to do reception work and you find yourself doing reception and typing, tell your temporary service. This is the kind of information they need to know to ensure you a proper hourly rate and to charge the company an appropriate figure for the work you are doing. Always tell your service when your responsibilities are upgraded from what you were originally told the assignment would entail. Ultimately, you can expect from $2 to $6 an hour more for your new skill.
