Medical Transcription Basics

Medical transcription training and schooling tips

Tag: free medical transcription education

How Can You Get Free Training for Medical Transcription?

Lots of people want to get a fast start when they decide to work in medical transcription. The only problem is that it’s not possible without training. When you’re looking for a new way to earn a living, having to pay for training isn’t exactly the most welcome thing. Can you get free training for medical transcription?

I’m sorry to say it doesn’t work like that, especially if you don’t want to fall for a work at home scam.

The way the free training for medical transcription scam usually works is they tell you the training is free once you pay them a few hundred dollars for the software you need. It must be their software. Once you have it, they’ll start training you.

The software may or may not work. Worse, the training they provide will not be good enough to get you work as a medical transcriptionist.

Sometimes they’ll say it’s on the job training, and that once you’re well enough trained you’ll become a paid employee. They’ll keep you working at it as long as you’re willing to stick around, but your work will never be good enough that you’ll get paid.

There are some things in life that are absolutely worth paying for even if you wish you could have them for free. Medical transcriptionist training is one of those things.

It’s really just like many other careers where you need to go to college or a vocational school in order to get that first job. It’s very rare for self trained people to make it on their own. Most people need that formal training and most employers want to see it before they will so much as consider hiring you. They need to know that you will be a capable transcriptionist and not need constant hand holding to do your work, especially if you become a home based medical transcriber.

Good online training in medical transcription is worth it in another way if you get a job that pays on production, as many at home positions do. The better you know how to do the work, the faster you can transcribe accurately, the more you’re going to earn. Knowing the job well is a huge advantage, and it’s not one you’re likely to have if you go for free training or try to train yourself.

Take some time when you’re choosing your medical transcriptionist training so that you get the benefits when you start working. Free isn’t worth it if you can’t find work after your training.

Get free information from Career Step about their online medical transcriptionist training.

Are There Any Free Medical Transcription Courses Online?

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.

Get free information from Career Step about their online medical transcriptionist training.

Is There Such a Thing as Legitimate Free Medical Transcription Training?

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.

It’s not free, but Career Step’s medical transcription course is a great value if you’re ready to get serious about a great career as a medical transcriptionist.