Can You Train Yourself in Medical Transcription and Still Get a Job?

The hardest part about getting started as a medical transcriptionist is finding training you can afford. Not everyone can easily afford to pay the costs of a decent quality training program. Is it possible to just train yourself and save some money?

Depends on how much you want a job and how good a job you can do on your own.

More and more, employers want to hire medical transcriptionists who have been through a training program that they are familiar with. This gives them the assurance that the new hire will have been well trained. They know what grades to require from students.

Good quality training programs cost at least $1500, and $1800-2400 are not at all uncommon. That’s a lot of money for most of us. It makes training yourself sound like a good plan.

It probably isn’t.

In the past it was possible to train yourself as a medical transcriptionist and get a job after; I did that myself. But employers are more picky now as online training has become more accessible. Employers want to hire people they know are ready for work.

To Train Yourself

If you really want to train yourself, you’re going to want to use the HPI-SUM program. This is used by many of the schools. Be warned, the first unit alone is $700 as of this writing, and you’ll have to spend more if you want to train for any specialties and you will need to buy reference books, such as a medical dictionary, to really be effective cialis price in your studies.

You particularly need to focus on your transcription skills. It should be obvious by the job title, but it bears mentioning. If you can’t transcribe extremely well, you may as well not bother. Your speed, your accuracy, your knowledge of the terminology all combine into your transcription skills, and they must be excellent if you want to work.

The trouble with training yourself is that you have to check all of your own work, and you won’t have a mentor to help you through it all. It really helps to have a mentor guiding you through the process.

You also finish without anything to show potential employers. They have only your word for it that you did a great job on your studies. This can be a huge disadvantage when applying for work.

So How Do Self Trained Medical Transcriptionists Find Work?

It’s a challenge to land that first job if you haven’t gone through formal training, even when you use the right training materials. You’re going to have to work harder at it. But it may not be impossible.

You can send inquiries to various medical transcription services and see if anyone will give you the chance to take their employment test. Many won’t, but you might find one that will.

You could also try starting your own Viagra Jelly business, and find your own medical transcription clients. This has the challenges of all businesses, and can be difficult, but if you can make it work, you may earn a better living than by working for a service.

Overall, it’s not a path I recommend for people who want to become medical transcriptionists. There’s too high a chance that your investment in course materials will be wasted, and you won’t be able to find work. That’s a bad deal no matter how you look at it.

Author Bio: Stephanie Foster runs http://www.medicaltranscriptionbasics.com/ for people interested in learning medical transcription. Find out how to pick the right online medical transcription program at her site.

Category: Career
Keywords: self trained medical transcriptionist,medical transcription training,medical transcription education

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