Medical transcription training and schooling tips
A good reference library is a big help to medical transcriptionists. Especially in your early days you will be referring to various books regularly.
I recommend:
Medical Dictionary
Drug Reference
Medical Abbreviation Book
ADHI Book of Style
Anatomy Text
Medical Phrase Book
You may also need to shop for other books depending on your specialty.
One of the big benefits trumpeted about for working at home as a medical transcriptionist is that you don’t need childcare. You can just be there for your kids. How true is that?
Depends on the hours you want to work and the ages of your kids.
Infants, toddlers and preschoolers need quite a bit of care. It only gets more challenging as they become more mobile, active and curious.
Doing medical transcription with children in this age range is difficult, but not impossible. You’ll need to work early mornings or late evenings into the night for the most part if you want to skip the childcare. You may also be able to get some work done during naptime or when your spouse or partner is home.
The simple truth about working with kids in this age range is that they aren’t going to give you much peace for getting work done. They want your attention. They need your attention.
Once your kids are old enough to send to school, your work at home life gets much easier. The kids are at school several hours a day, during which you are free to work, assuming you send them to school rather than homeschool.
School age children do need your attention once they’re home, of course, but you can also work some hours while they’re home. Teach them when it’s okay to interrupt you, and allow them age appropriate independence.
You may be able to set up your home office so that you can watch kids in this age range play in the backyard. Have your desk near a window with a good view of the yard, and you can keep a light eye on them while they enjoy themselves in the fresh air and sunshine. Or keep your office door open as they play in the house.
All this doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t need childcare for your kids. It means you may be able to limit your childcare expenses if you do need to use childcare.
These clearly available hours may not be enough for you to work the number of hours you need in order to earn a living, for example. You may need the kids to spend some time in childcare so that you can support your family. This takes a bite out of what you’re earning, but so long as it’s significantly less than you earn while the kids are away, it should be worth it.
If you want to save on that cost, find another at home parent to trade off with. You watch their kids, they watch yours. It’s best if the children are friends and similar in ages, so that their time together is seen more as playtime than as being cared for by another parent. Just sounds more fun to the kids.
While you don’t want to miss out on those milestones that are probably a big part of why you want to get into working at home in medical transcription, you need to think about what you need to earn to get by. There should be a balance you can strike so that you are there for your kids as much as possible while earning a living in this flexible career.
College for many is a time for working odd jobs. But it might be nicer to work a job with good pay and flexible hours.
Medical transcription may fit the bill for some college students. It’s a bit challenging to get started, as you need to get the education for the job first, adding to your school workload and expenses.
Medical transcription is a great fit for some majors. If you’re going into the medical field anyhow, the things you learn as a medical transcriptionist are quite relevant. But you may find it an interesting job choice even if it’s not relevant to your long term goals.
Your first step is to decide if you can afford a quality medical transcription training program. They’re not cheap, not if you want quality, not if you want to be able to get a job after graduating from the program. But the job will pay better than many of the classic jobs students work while in college.
The flexibility is wonderful for a student. You can work at your dorm or apartment if you like, although noisy roommates may be a little challenging to deal with. But you can schedule your work around your classes, the times you prefer to sleep and the times that you know things are going to be a bit noisy.
Most employers will want you to work at least 20 hours a week, rather like a typical part time job. But since you can schedule them yourself you can figure out which hours are the right ones for you.
This isn’t a job I suggest you start training for too close to graduation unless you want to keep working it for a time after. Employers aren’t going to want someone who will quit too quickly. But if you have a couple of years to go in college at least, it’s probably going to be worth your time.
The pay can be quite good. It depends on you for most employers when you work from home. They’ll pay you on production. You’ll get a certain amount per line. $0.07 per line may not sound like much, but it can add up quickly as you build your skills. A good transcriptionist can earn more than $15 an hour that way. Beginners will often earn less.
The best part is that you probably already own much of what you need to be able to work. A computer with high speed internet access is a big part of it. The other thing you will need is a foot pedal control, but those are pretty easy to get. You may even get one as a part of your training program.
You may find it a bit more difficult to get some privacy to work. This is not work you can do with a party going on behind you, and you shouldn’t do it with other people in the room. You’ll be transcribing someone’s private medical records. Privacy is mandatory. This makes medical transcription a better job if you can have your computer in a room where you can close the door.
The great part is that you’re most likely the one deciding on your work hours. Your employer may sometimes call you and ask if you’d like more hours, but most of the time you send in your schedule and that’s when you work. You won’t have to work holidays if you don’t want to. You won’t have to work on your usual days if you change your schedule because there’s a party you want to go to. Just give enough notification.
Don’t fool yourself. It’s not easy work. If you choose to work as a medical transcriptionist, you will work hard. It’s a job that takes a great deal of knowledge and attention to detail. You’ll want to be more accurate in your transcription than you are in even your notes for class.
A great education is vital to getting started as a medical transcriptionist. Choose wrong and it become very difficult to land that first job that gives you the experience you need to have a great career.
The basic curriculum a good medical transcription school should include:
AHDI Approval is a great way to be certain that the school you choose is providing what you need to know to work as a medical transcriptionist.
I strongly recommend taking an online course such as offered by CareerStep if you are going to work at home in medical transcription. This gives you training conditions more like the working conditions you are seeking, and the company has a good reputation with many employers. It also has financing options for those who have concerns in that area. They are AHDI Approved.
Do not just sign up for a cheap course. There are many cheaper courses out there, but they don’t cover all the information you need and you are unlikely to get a job after graduation. Better to spend a bit more and build the career you want.
One of the biggest challenges facing many potential medical transcription students is paying for their course. A good training program isn’t cheap, and most of the best schools aren’t a part of the Pell Grant program. How are you supposed to pay for it?
Costs for a good training program run from about $1800 on up. There are cheaper programs out there, but most are not of the quality you need if you want to actually work as a medical transcriptionist.
There are a few options beyond hauling out the credit card or committing a significant chunk of savings to pay for your classes. You can do that if it’s within your financial reach, but it’s not the right choice for everyone.
The first thing you should look at is what the school of your choice offers. Many have a payment plan available. Some have Sallie Mae loans available. Some programs offer their own tuition reduction for students who need the financial help.
You should also check with your state’s Department of Education website. They may have grants or other aid available to you. Some will one work with Pell Grants, but check to see what is required in your state. There may be assistance available for students of occupational and vocational programs.
The school may be able to help you find aid in your state as well. Check their website for information on programs they’re approved for in your state.
You can also check with your bank to see what kinds of loans they offer. These aren’t as nice to have as a grant or money off your tuition, but learning a skill like medical transcription is an investment in your future.
An important thing to remember is that you may be able to pay back the money you spend on your education fairly quickly once you have a job if you worked hard in your studies. A good medical transcriptionist will earn back their tuition easily. The pain of spending the money should be only a temporary issue.
Not everyone finds their first transcription job immediately after graduation. That’s something you’d face no matter what kind of job you’re looking for. How often do you really find a challenging job within the first few positions you apply for?
You should be prepared for the possibility of a job hunt that takes several months. If you stretched yourself just paying the tuition this isn’t a pleasant aspect to deal with. If you have loans to pay back after graduation, it can be even more painful.
Have a backup plan for if you don’t start working right away. If you don’t need it, great, but if you got a loan, need to pay back your credit card or need to keep up on your payment plan, you’re going to want to have some idea as to how you will manage all that. If you’re married, this is something to discuss with your spouse so that expectations are realistic. If you have family who are willing to help you if you need it, talk to them. If you might have to get a lower level job for a time while you hunt for a good transcription job, do it.
If you know you choose a good medical transcription school and did well in the program, you should be able to find a job in the field eventually. How long it takes depends on the job market at the moment, your transcription skills and how hard you search. Keep trying and the investment in your education will be worth it.
One of the biggest challenges for a newly trained medical transcriptionist is finding that first job. It’s the classic dilemma of needing experience to land a job when no one will hire you to give you experience.
This is one of the areas where quality training comes in handy. If you make the right choice in medical transcription schools, the reputation of the school will help you to land a good job. Schools such as CareerStep have good reputations with many employers. This makes getting hired much easier.
If multiple levels of training are offered, you may be better off taking more than just the minimum level. My own employer, for example, preferred students who took at least the Gold level classes through CareerStep. They weren’t particularly interested in students who only took the basic, Silver level classes. I won’t say it was impossible to get hired as a Silver level student, merely that it was more difficult.
Many schools will offer job placement assistance. If it’s offered, take advantage of it!
Another great way to find your first job is to start asking around at medical transcription forums to see if anyone knows of a company that hires newly trained and inexperienced medical transcriptionists. There are companies out there that will do this. Otherwise I never would have landed my own first medical transcription job. MT Desk has a good forum.
You can also do your own searches online or in the newspaper. There are plenty of job sites such as Monster.com where you can post your resume and easily apply for any medical transcription jobs that are posted. You can even have the site email you job search results daily.
There are also sites that have lists of medical transcription companies that you can contact and ask if they will test you. Many require 2 or more years’ experience, but if the site doesn’t make their preferences clear, ask!
If you don’t mind working outside the home for a time, check with local hospitals and clinics for on-site positions. It can be much easier to land a job on-site than off when you lack experience. It can also be extremely helpful to be surrounded by people who already know the job quite well.
Talk to your doctor. Your doctor may or may not need a medical transcriptionist, but he or she may know someone who does. You can also try your veterinarian if you’ve studied that terminology, your chiropractor, your dentist… any medical professional you know. If you have to pick up some new terminology to work for them, just consider it a good career habit.
Whatever you do, keep practicing your transcription. If you have the tapes from your studies, keep on transcribing them. It’s good to keep your mind on it, and you’ll keep improving your skills. Once you land the job, your ability to type fast and accurately becomes even more vital. You don’t want to lose your touch.
So you want to be a medical transcriptionist but the expense of paying for classes is getting you down. Then you hear about a free training course. Shouldn’t you just go for that?
Odds are that no, you shouldn’t.
The simple problem is that most free training courses are in fact scams. They’ll probably try to sell you software while claiming that the training itself is free. But then their training won’t be enough to get you an actual job as a medical transcriptionist.
There’s a very good reason why most medical transcription training costs significant money. Your teachers need to be paid for their efforts, and if they’re teaching at a good online school, they were probably excellent medical transcriptionists before. Their knowledge and skills are worth money to you and to them.
The free medical transcription training scam is most common as a part of a work at home job scam. They’ll say that the company will train you on the job for free if you just buy their software for a $300 or so. But you’ll never meet their quality standards to become a paid employee, assuming you even get the software working. In the meantime you’ve lost some money and are wasting time you could have better spent learning real medical transcription.
Top it off with the simple fact that legitimate employers are picky about who they hire as medical transcriptionists. You’ll be working with people’s private medical information. They need well trained employees who really understand the kind of work they’re doing and the absolute need for accuracy and privacy. Employers want employees who are either experienced or who have gone through a trusted training program. There aren’t any free programs that meet that criteria for any employers that I know of. At least not legitimate employers.
It may amaze you to hear that free can be a scam. That’s the simple, sad truth about working at home. There are many people who know just how desperate others are to work at home, and they have no problem with taking advantage of the situation.
Paying for a high quality course may be difficult. Many people who want to work at home want to do so in part because they’re desperately short of money. But paying for a course is an investment in your future career. Do your research before signing up for any training program and look for the payment plans they may have available. In many cases you won’t need to come up with all the money upfront in order to take a high quality medical transcription online course.
Medical transcription is a good career with growth potential, and great for people who want to work at home. It’s flexible, challenging, and even fun for the right kind of person.
It’s also a bit difficult to get started. How do you get past that two years of experience requirement so many employers have?
Going through a quality medical transcription training program will help you get past one of the biggest obstacles in this career – landing your first medical transcription job. There are schools that have partnerships with certain employers. These partnerships mean the employers agree to test applicants who graduate from that school with certain achievement levels. If you pass, the experience requirement goes away.
Make sure you select an AHDI Approved program. These are the programs that have proven their worth, and many of them have excellent reputations with potential employers.
Even with a good training under your belt, jobs aren’t going to come hunting for you. You have to hunt for them.
Have your resume ready. It should emphasize how well you did in your coursework.
Take advantage of any resources your school offers you. This includes any employers they partner with and any job boards they offer. Check on these daily while you’re hunting for a job.
No matter how well you do in your studies, sometimes the jobs just aren’t there right away. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re trying to get into.
Be persistent in your job hunt, and pay particular attention to jobs from any company you believe you would prefer to work for. Remember that there is competition for every job opening. Just because you don’t make it through on the first try doesn’t mean you won’t get hired later on.
If your job hunt is taking a while, make sure you keep up with your skills so that you don’t forget what you learned during your training. Participate in medical transcription forums. Review your coursework. Keep up with happenings in the industry.
For most people who graduate with good scores, a job will happen eventually. How long it takes depends a bit on luck and a lot on how hard you search for that first job.
The medical transcription industry keeps changing. It wasn’t so many years ago that transcriptionists had to pick up and drop off their work. Then they started being able to dial into phone systems to listen to dictation, and send in their reports by fax or over an internet connection. Now pretty much all of the work is done over the internet.
And that’s just the technology changes transcriptionists have had to deal with, not the new medications, drugs and procedures they have to keep up with.
But the biggest change for medical transcriptionists may be coming as doctors and hospitals move over to electronic records and the frequency of doctors using voice recognition software increases. Will you be ready as a medical transcriptionist to keep moving your career forward?
One way to keep up is to participate in a medical transcription forum. What you haven’t heard about on your own, someone else on the forum is certain to have heard of.
Find a good, active forum. There may be one associated with your school that graduates can use, but there are several others available as well.
AHDI is the largest group of medical transcriptionists and other healthcare documenters in the world. It gives you access to further training that may benefit you as a transcriptionist. It’s also a great resource if you’re thinking about other career paths a medical transcriptionist can take.
One of the great parts about being a member of a professional organization is that it gives you the chance to network with others in your same career. This is truly wonderful for people who work at home and don’t get the daily social time people who work in offices get. It’s nice to know that others in your industry are dealing with the same challenges.
You may also want to consider additional formal training. It is possible to get training now to deal with electronic medical records and editing reports generated by electronic medical records. This training can qualify you to work as a medical transcription editor, which some feel is where the industry is headed.
There are programs that can train you as a medical transcription editor whether you’re just starting your training as a medical transcriptionist or you have years of experience. For people who haven’t done medical transcription before, the course is simply combined with the training all medical transcriptionists need.
Taking on this training is a great addition to your resume. It opens up more positions for you and is an assurance that you can continue in this industry as it continues to change.
Working at home is a popular choice for many people with disabilities. It can be much simpler to work something flexible at home than to deal with whatever limitations your disabilities cause at an office or other place of work.
Medical transcription is a very popular work at home job. It has its challenges, such as getting trained properly for the work, and finding that first job, but overall it’s not a bad option.
How well suited you are to medical transcription depends on a few factors. There are the basic ones that apply to anyone wanting to transcribe, such as your language skills, ability to pick up new information, and your drive to work without supervision.
When you’re disabled you may have other factors to consider. How will your disability impact your ability to work? Will you need special software or equipment?
You’ll be able to handle many of the accommodations you need for this job on your own, and if you use your computer regularly already, you may have them already. Voice recognition software can be a big help for those who have difficulty typing due to disabilities, for example. You may need to get a specialized update for it to help the software with medical terminology and really pay attention to what it types on the screen for you, but this sort of technology is becoming more common anyhow.
You will need to go through a training program to work as a medical transcriptionist. That’s a simple reality for this job. There’s a lot to learn, such as medical terminology, formatting and the skill of transcription itself. There are some very good online training programs you can try that allow you to proceed at pretty much your own pace.
You will most likely be an independent contractor, although some companies will hire you as an employee and even offer benefits such as health coverage if you work a full time schedule.
The challenge in getting the first job after training always comes down to experience. This is where you make sure to choose a great training program. If you choose a high quality program and excel in it you have a much better chance at quickly landing a job after graduation. But as with any kind of job hunt it make take only a few days or it may take several months or more. There are never any guarantees of work.
There’s no one job that’s right for anyone, no matter their skills or challenges. You’re the only one who can determine if you want to try to become a medical transcriptionist. Take a look at what the career involves, and if it seems right, go for it!
© 2026 Medical Transcription Basics
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
