Free is such a pretty word to many people. Sometimes however, the results of getting something for free are pretty ugly. Free isn’t always worth it.
That’s the case with free medical transcriptionist courses online. They aren’t going to teach you medical transcription. Despite that initial claim of free, there’s probably an expense that you’ll lose as well.
Many supposed free courses don’t charge you for whatever training they say they’ll offer. They’ll charge you for software or something like that. It won’t be worth the money. Their free training won’t be worth the time you spend on it, because it won’t help you to get a real job later on. All in all, free medical transcriptionist courses are a huge waste of time, and possibly money.
Medical transcriptionist courses aren’t free for one very good reason. It takes a lot of time and effort to develop the course, and once it’s developed there are still teachers to pay. Someone has to be available to the students when they have questions.
Free also costs you in lack of quality. Odds are they aren’t going to teach you enough to become a medical transcriptionist, not by a long shot.
It’s not just the terminology or even the formatting. It’s learning how to transcribe. It takes hours of practice with real doctor dictation to prepare yourself for even an entry level medical transcription job. That’s not something a free course is going to provide.
Then there’s the matter of reputation. A medical transcriptionist must be extremely accurate in his or her work. That’s hard to judge in a freshly trained graduate of any program if the employer isn’t familiar with it. Testing only tells them so much. Employers prefer being able to trust the course you took to have trained you well. If they’re familiar with the reputation of that course, they’ll know if they can trust that or not.
Some free course that pops up online isn’t going to have that trust. It’s not going to build up a good reputation because it’s not going to teach you well enough. Providing quality training costs too much for free to be a viable business model. The time it takes to learn medical transcription is prohibitive as well. The model doesn’t hold up.
There’s one more way a free medical transcriptionist course can cost you. It can cost you wasted time in job hunting. How long are you going to have to job hunt when you don’t have the skills you’d hoped to get? How long will you waste time thinking you can get this when you haven’t been given good quality materials and a teacher to help you master transcription? What will it take to get an employer to take a chance on you?
That costs you whatever income you could have been making after paying for a good course. The upfront cost of the training might just help you get into the career faster.
