My new job

I have either been promoted or demoted depending on how you look at it. The good news is that I now have a full-time job that comes with benefits. YAY!

I will be taking over for the secretary at church who finally decided to go back to school. I'll be starting the full-time work in the middle of august, and right now I need to negotiate my pay. The offer is for the same pay the current secretary is receiving, but that is waaayyy too low and I know I'm worth more. It's not only way below average for a secretary, but basically the job is more than that. It's office manager combined with executive secretary. Granted this is a church, so I'm not gonna be greedy, so I did some research and the average pay for a secretary is $45K in my local area. The low end reported was $35K. The offer is for $28K. Hmmmmm... that doesn't seem quite right. Part of the problem is that the secretary before this one never wanted much money because her husband was working too, and she was only working to fill the time and the church needed a new secretary. The current secretary was very young with little experience as a secretary and so she accepted such little pay. On top of that, the annual raise is only 2%... that's going to accumulate over the years, and continue to slip behind normal comparative pay. So I plan to negotiate for $35K,the low end. That would be sufficient. And the good newsis that there is a precedence for comparing the salary to industry standards. I'm using non-profit standards. 15 years ago or so, the two women sharing the job (my mom and another) were told they should look into industry standards to give the church a good idea what they should be getting paid. The church does want to pay a fair wage. So hopefully it'll work for me too.