How to Become a Professional Transcriptionist

From businesses to public service institutes, every organization has now adopted transcription to facilitate one or more of its functions. Due to this reason, the demand for professional transcriptionists has grown substantially over the past few years.

If you want to be a professional transcriptionist, here is how you can become one.

What a Transcriptionist Does?

Transcriptionists create a written copy of an audio file or verbal dictation. The service may cover general transcriptions to highly specialized projects, including those for medical, legal, and business meetings and conferences.

Transcriptionists may either be freelance professionals or full time employees who may work at an office, a court room, or other real settings. If you are considering working as a transcriptionist, here is what you may need.

Requirements for General Transcriptionists

As general transcription is not technical in nature, a specialized degree or educational qualification is not necessary to be hired as a transcriptionist. However, an administrative assistant associate’s degree can help you learn better about office procedures and business documentation to become more competitive in the market.

Usually general transcriptionists need to have basic skills to perform their jobs well. However, you may need some additional skills and qualifications to fill a unique niche as a transcriptionist.

General Skills

Listening Skills – As a transcriptionist, you are required to receive and write down messages in an accurate manner. Therefore, it is important for you to have extraordinary listening skills to grasp the spoken words, process them, and write them down accurately.

Typing – A good typing speed and accuracy are integral to create documents efficiently, especially in real time transcription. Even when you are converting audio into written words, you need to have a minimum speed of 60 words per minute for efficient use of time and energy. If you are not good at typing, it is indispensable for you to practice to pick pace.

Comprehensive Knowledge of English – Sound knowledge of spellings, grammar, and punctuation is very important to translate spoken words into written text. A slight mistake of spelling or punctuation can completely change the meaning of the message. So, consider refining your English skills if you want to excel as a transcriptionist.

Requirements for Medical Transcriptionists

If you are seeking to become a medical transcriptionist, you need to have basic knowledge of medical terminologies and documentation. In order to learn these concepts, you can enroll into medical transcription certificate courses, like Certified Medical Transcriptionist (CMT) or Registered Medical Transcriptionist (RTM), which provide training in terminology, anatomy, industry ethics, and document preparation. In addition to this, you should complete an internship program to learn how classroom concepts apply in real world.

Requirements for Legal Transcriptionists

Legal transcription requires appropriate knowledge of legal terminologies and documentation. Certificate courses in legal transcription can help you learn the technical skills, basics of the legal system, research, and legal documentation. However, if you want more comprehensive knowledge, you should get an associate degree in legal administrative assistance.

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