When you decide to study to become a medical transcriptionist, it’s natural to be eager to finish your studies and find a job. That’s your actual goal, after all. It’s perfectly reasonable to wonder how long medical transcription training online should take.
Don’t believe every answer you read.
Some courses will claim you can learn medical transcription in as little as eight weeks. I don’t believe it, and I don’t feel you should either, at least not if you’re serious about a career in medical transcription. You can learn quite a bit in eight weeks if you work hard at it, but not enough to become a really productive medical transcriptionist. That takes time.
The programs offering to teach you to be a medical transcriptionist in a very short period of time will rush you through things you need to spend more time on. That’s especially true of transcription practice. Becoming a medical transcriptionist is not all about knowing the words or being able to type. You have to know how to transcribe, and that takes something a bit more.
On the short side of things, four months is not an impossible goal for a serious student with plenty of time for studies. You can do it that fast, and really that’s not too bad for learning an entirely new career. You’ll have to work hard to make it that fast.
It often takes longer, however. Nine months isn’t entirely unreasonable.
Some schools offer two year programs in medical transcription. This usually comes from a community college, and they may expect you to take unrelated courses in order to graduate. If you just want to become a medical transcriptionist, that’s not necessary.
Add in the inconvenience of having to register for each individual course needed to graduate from the community college program, and being slowed down if your schedule doesn’t work out with the classes available, and you may see why I suggest sticking with training online.
Many online training programs for medical transcriptionists are self paced. There’s no real promise about how fast you will complete the course.
That’s useful. That means you can keep your day job or continue with your family obligations as you learn your new career. It’s harder to get into a new career if it means giving up your old work before you’re even qualified for the new.
Do not rush yourself as you learn medical transcription. Take some time. Make sure you’re really picking up the skills you need.
If you find you can do this more quickly than you had originally planned, congratulations. That’s a wonderful thing.
But if you find you’re struggling a bit more, or your schedule isn’t working out, or other challenges slow you down and the whole thing is taking longer than you planned, well, that’s how things go sometimes. Be glad that self paced programs are flexible enough to allow you to learn at the rate you can do best. You don’t have to worry so much that you aren’t going to finish on time. The amount of time medical transcriptionist training online takes can be the amount of time you need it to take.