Careers New Zealand Scoops Plain English Award

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2015

Careers New Zealand Scoops Plain English Award

Winning the Plain English Champion — Best Individual or Team category at the Writemark 2015 Plain English Awards, is a celebration of Careers New Zealand’s commitment to online content that is engaging and easy to understand.

“We are extremely proud of the quality and relevance of our digital information and resources. Over the last five years our online content team has worked hard to embed a plain English culture into our organisation, and this is having beneficial effect on the people who use our online services,” says Careers New Zealand Chief Executive, Keith Marshall.

Judges of the Plain English Champion — Best Individual or Team category of the Plain English Awards had to say:

“The online content team is clearly driving plain English at Careers New Zealand. Not only has the Careers New Zealand website been a model plain English website for over five years, the work of the online content team is affecting the entire organisation. Plain English is now successfully embedded in the organisation’s DNA.

“We liked the language you’ve used on the website. It's easy to understand and uses words the audience uses without sounding silly.”

“Our focus on plain English, testing new online content with our users and taking notice of solicited and unsolicited feedback we receive has been especially useful in developing our new responsive website,” says Keith.

Careers New Zealand’s website, careers.govt.nz, receives close to four million New Zealand visits a year – which equates to eight visits every minute.

“Our responsive website is making it easier for people to access our information via their phones and tablets. This combined with our focus on plain English will help more people to make informed career choices based on credible, relevant, easy to understand information.

A recent survey conducted by Ipsos shows the beneficial effect plain English has on Careers New Zealand’s online services.

“The results showed 83% of the users found the information on our website easy to understand,” says Keith Marshall.

“What is more exciting is 96% of the website users said that they will use the website again, and 94% said that they will recommend it to others."

Keith Marshall says the sheer volume of use, ease and accessibility of information is helping New Zealanders get ‘career ready’.

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