Well, Real Life got in the way for a while, but now I'm back on track. It's good to have things settled back into my old routine of living a sedentary life full of creating art, blogging and transcribing. Okay, well not totally sedentary...but more on that some other time.
I got asked a legitimate question recently about my job. It's a question I get asked fairly frequently, and I don't mind answering. But since I tend to say the same thing over and over again, I figured a blog post about it would be appropriate.
So what is my job? Well, I'm sure you can tell by this post title that I'm a transcriptionist. And not just any transcriptionist...I do my job from home!
Now I do need to clarify that I do not do medical transcription. I transcribe for an online company that gets audio files from just about anyone you can think of: computer corporations, major medical companies, hospitals, government branches, television stations, and my favorite:
NASA!
(OT: I sincerely love getting NASA files. Not only because I'm a geek/nerd, but also because NASA people truly, truly love their job. They are so happy and excited to talk about what they're doing. It makes for a very pleasant couple of hours!)
Now since I work from home, I get a lot of questions about my job because let's face it: working from home is really an attractive situation. However, I'm here to tell you something that you probably don't want to hear. So let's get started in
Why Being a Transcriptionist is (maybe) NOT Right For You.
(Or, at least, most of you.)
First, exactly what is transcription?
Transcription is listening to an audio file and then typing what you hear into a document. Of course, transcription has always been around--basically it's just writing down what someone is saying as they're saying it. Before typewriters, it was usually done by
shorthand, which is a system of abbreviated writing that the writer later goes back and writes (or types) up so it is understandable to the average reader. A person who wrote in shorthand was usually called a stenographer. The term is still used today, usually in describing court reporters.
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A stenographer transcribes what her boss is dictating to her in 1908.
From Early Office Museum at www.officemuseum.com |
Check out this page at Early Office Museum for some really cool info on dictating machines.
Most people think of transcription as being in a court environment or medical, documenting the court proceedings or typing up a doctor's notes for the patient's file. However, transcription exists in all areas of business and social environments. I've transcribed lots of types of files, from TV show interviews to HOA meetings.
It is physically impossible for a human being to be able to write or type as fast as we can talk. So there are lots of established shortcuts in writing and typing for transcription. In some cases, such as in medical and court documentation, there are schools you need to go to to get certified in being able to qualify to transcribe in those fields.
Let's just go through the pros and cons of working as a transcriptionist from home first. I need to make it clear that when you work as a transcriptionist, you are usually working as a subcontractor, unless you're in an office working for a specific company. Subcontracting has great benefits, but also great sacrifices. Here's an important overview of both of those.
While The Oatmeal pretty much nails it on the head here, I also have my own list specific to transcription.
Pros
1. You get to work from home. This means no commute, no budgeting for lunch at work (whether you eat out or in), no work wardrobe, no underwear if you so desire. This actually saves a lot of money in the long run. I don't think I really realized how much money I was paying for vehicle fuel, clothes and lunches until I stopped working at an office. Plus I live in Arizona, so the commute was always long, like one to two hours, and we don't have a good public transportation system in this state to fall back on. An eight-hour day can turn into a 12-hour day if your commute is really long.
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| Why yes, these are some of my uniforms, TYVM. |
2. You get to make your own schedule. As long as your work gets done on time, transcription companies don't care when you work. I am a night owl, so I actually don't usually do a lot of work until after 9 pm. This gives me tons of time to get errands done during the day, go to doctor's appointments, take care of the animals and spend time with The Viking. Then I can sit down to work without any distractions such as the phone or email. It's very easy for me to get work done fast that way.
As a night owl, I also naturally am not someone who gets up early, like before 8 or 9 am. I have literally fallen asleep at my desk before at an office job solely because I had to be up early every day. It's a lot safer for me not to be driving when I'm tired, too. I've been in too many near-accidents to want to do a long commute while tired ever again.
3. You can take time off whenever you want. If it's not an extended period of time, you can take a Friday or Monday off for a three-day weekend and not have to even tell work about it (depending on the company you work for, of course). I have had to move and have told my work that I won't be able to work for a couple of weeks, and they didn't mind. When I broke my wrist, I kept my work updated on my progress and estimated time back to work, and they appreciated it.
4. You can write off a lot of household expenses on your taxes. Things like a portion of your mortgage, rent, electricity, and water bills can be write-offs. A new computer and office supplies related to your work can also be write-offs. I recommend contacting a CPA to help you with this, though. I personally am not tax-savvy, so I let someone else handle these details.
5. Schooling for transcription can be a write-off on taxes. Of course, going to school can be a write-off in itself, especially if you're not receiving any financial aid. This extends to classes related to transcription as well, including classes on learning software or typing classes.
6. No requirements to work weekends. I haven't worked for a transcription company yet that required anyone to work weekends. If you want to take work on a Friday that isn't due until Monday and not do the work until Saturday or Sunday, that's your option, but it's not required. Again, as long as your work gets done on time, the company doesn't care when you do it.
7. No requirements to go to social functions, such as holiday parties or luncheons. This is something I really love about being a transcriptionist. I really hate work social functions. To me, all I see are a bunch of CEOs patting themselves on the back and thinking they're doing something "special" for their workers. I don't need a contrived corporate Christmas party to feel needed or useful. Just give me my paycheck and tell me I'm doing a good job at reviews. That's what I need.
8. No annual reviews or worrying about whether or not you're going to get a bonus or raise. To me, this is huge. The stress of an annual review or worrying about whether or not you're getting a raise and the disappointment that usually goes along with it is not something I dealt with well. I'm happy with just coming in, doing my job, and going home. If I suck at it, fire me. If I'm good, let me know and give me a raise/bonus. Don't toy with me by dangling a mediocre review or whether or not I'll get a raise over my head.
Cons
1. Pay is based on the amount of pages produced, lines produced, or audio minutes you claim; it is NOT based on hours. This may not seem like a big deal. For example, let's say you get paid $1.00 per audio minute. You take a 60-minute file that day, and that will equal $60. Sixty bucks for a few hours' work is pretty good, right?
However, you must remember that it is physically impossible for a human being to type or write as fast as we talk. So on average, transcribing an audio file can take three times the length of that file to finish. That means a 60-minute file can take up to three hours to finish. Okay, so that means $20 an hour. No too shabby.
Unfortunately, this is assuming that the audio file is a clear recording with speakers you can completely understand. More often than not, the speakers can mumble, be too far from the mike to be heard, or can have thick accents. Sometimes the recording is of a meeting in a conference room and the mike is in the middle of the table, so shuffling papers, writing on a hard surface, coughing or sneezing, the air conditioner, and other background noises can really make things difficult.
I used to work for a company that mostly took in audio files from insurance companies. When you're transcribing an insurance claim, all sorts of issues can come up. If it's over the phone, children playing or dogs barking in the background can cause problems. A connection can be lost or the client can be distracted. You must be able to decipher what's being said beyond any excessive background noise.
So, a 60-minute file can easily become an eight-hour ordeal if you are struggling with the quality. That means you're probably making about $7.50 per hour at that point, right next to the federal minimum wage. And this is not consistent, either. I have calculated that I've made $5 an hour on an audio file before solely because it was so difficult to transcribe because the quality was so bad.
2. Unless you work an exorbitant amount of hours, you don't get paid much. See above explanation. You'll find that you're usually wiped out after a 60-minute file, even if it is a clear audio, so taking tons of minutes per day may not be feasible for you. Plus it's important to relisten to the audio while checking your work, and that adds another 60 minutes or more to your time.
Then there's my situation, where I broke my wrist and was immobile for quite some time. I used to be able to take about 90 minutes per day. Now I'm down to 40 or 50 minutes. Since the healing of the soft tissue of my wrist is not going well, I don't know if I'll get back up to 90 minutes again.
3. Sometimes there's not enough work to go around. We recently moved, which provided a good example in my work world. I couldn't work for a few weeks while we were moving. Once I got mostly unpacked I could go back to work. The week before, the queue was overflowing with work. The week I was ready to work...practically nothing. One day I was barely about to claim a 46-minute file before someone else snatched it up. So even if you plan to work every day, work is not guaranteed every day.
4. You only get paid when you work. Pretty self-explanatory. Since you're a subcontractor, you don't get a salary. You also won't have the office environment down time where you're waiting on someone else to get work to you, or you have nothing to do and you're just BSing the day away but still get paid because you're there or are on a salary.
5. No paid time off or benefits. That means no holiday pay, no PTO, no 401K, and most importantly, no insurance. These issues aren't a major factor for me as I'm married and my husband is salaried. I am on his insurance, which is actually pretty good insurance. If you are relying on transcription as your salary, though, be prepared to not have the benefits that will keep you going in times of crisis or in needing to take a break from work.
6. No bonuses or raises. Most transcription companies don't give raises within a certain department. For example, I work in a corporate department, so I make less than the folks who work in the law enforcement department. The pay scales are different due to what the clients are willing to pay the transcription companies. And there are definitely no yearly bonuses. You're paid for the work you do, and that's it.
7. You MUST be able to handle being focused and not let distractions of home bother you. I have what my mom refers to as tunnel vision. I get it from the Croatian. I truly can zone into one thing and focus on it completely and get it done in a reasonable amount of time. I can close out any other distractions. Also, I actually can play soft music in the background while transcribing since I can focus solely on the audio file. I'm known for playing movies while working on reports because it's just background noise to me. The radio and TV help me focus instead of distracting me. Distractions to me are the phone ringing, coworkers coming with new projects to work on or just to shoot the breeze, things like that.
Not everyone is capable of working without distractions. They let the TV, radio, food, pets, or kids get in the way of finishing their work. They are usually better off in a real work environment because being at home is a distraction in and of itself for them. It isn't for me, and that's just how I am.
8. Your typing, listening and grammar skills must be superb. If you hunt and peck, believe me, you absolutely will not be fast enough to get work done in a reasonable amount of time. It's been proven that
correct typing, or touch typing, is the fastest and most reliable method to maximize time management when doing typing work for a living. Most companies require you to be able to type at least 65 words per minute (wpm). I type over 100 wpm, or at least I used to before the broken wrist. I'm still pretty darn fast, though. I took a typing class as an elective in high school, and I thank my mom a lot for forcing me to do it. My jobs have always revolved around typing, plus I have a B.A. in English, so I wrote a lot of papers in college. Typing is my life's blood, and it will become yours if you become a transcriptionist.
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| 1959 typing class |
Listening doesn't seem to be that big of a deal, but it truly is. If you're required to type verbatim, that means you must type every little nuance you hear, such as uhs, ums, you knows, and potentially indicate when someone laughs or sneezes. In our everyday life, we automatically tune out those sounds to understand what that person is trying to tell us. In transcription, you must type exactly what you hear and not make assumptions about what the speaker is trying to say. If you have any hearing problems, that can also come into play. Sometimes you must be able to hear the difference between such words as "day" and "bay," and sentence context doesn't always help with those issues.
Grammar is huge. No textspeak, misspellings or grammar mistakes. Your work must be pristine and free of grammar errors, just as a published book is. If you don't know the difference between "there", "their" and "they're", then don't even consider transcription until you've taken some basic grammar classes. If you do know the difference between those, then be sure you also know what the difference between the need for a possessive apostrophe versus a contraction is. Don't know your homonyms or even what "homonyms" means? Then transcription is not for you.
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| Everyone should learn to read good and do other stuff good too. |
While there are always spell-check and grammar correction programs out there, even they can be wrong sometimes because they don't know the inflections of the speaker's voice or what they are trying to communicate. Only you can decipher that, and you must do so as correctly as possible.
Now, if you are still interested in becoming an at-home transcriptionist, there is the all-important question to answer:
How do I get into transcription?
I got into transcription in a weird, roundabout way. My mom was a transcriptionist Back In The Day. She was out of high school and worked at a hospital, where one day the doctor walked up to her and told her to type up his notes. So she did. Sometimes they were written, sometimes they were recordings, but she typed them. There was no training other than having a medical dictionary at her side.
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| How I picture my mom doing med trans. |
Medical transcription has changed since my mom used to do it. Nowadays you need to at least have formal training in the subject. Medical jargon is truly its own language, so it's important to know that language before having to transcribe it. For example, I don't know Spanish, so I would never transcribe a document that's in Spanish. It's the same for the medical community.
I decided that I wanted to learn medical transcription after working in the corporate world for a good 12 years or so. So I found a school and took medical transcription. I was able to get a student loan to do so (and am still paying off that student loan, natch).
After taking the courses and passing, I needed to get certified. In order to get certified, you need to have some medical transcription background. The problem was that I tried to get into the field right when a lot of hospitals were sending their transcription overseas, mostly to the Philippines. Why? It was cheaper, of course. So I learned that if you didn't already have good experience in the field, it was going to be hard to get into it.
I took on some other jobs--worked at a couple of vet hospitals for a while--until I found an online ad for training for regular transcription. I jumped on the ad, took the required tests to apply, and was quickly approved. I was trained in regular transcription, but honestly, I had already done it on my own at the office jobs I had had. What the training helped me do was learn how to listen better and how to make my typing go smoother. The problem was the company itself...but more on that in the next section.
After being with that company for a few years, I realized they were not quite the company I thought I had signed up for, so I applied for other transcription jobs. Currently, I work for a large online transcription company that is great to work for. It's easy to get files, easy to do the work, and easy to talk with my superiors when I need help. As a subcontractor, I have also worked at multiple companies at the same time, but this particular company I've stuck with because they're so easy to work with, and work is fairly steady.
So what I recommend for you to get into transcription is if you can, find some kind of transcription training. Perhaps a local community college offers it, or maybe there's online classes you can take. I googled "general transcription training" and a lot of options came up. Transcription is one of those things that most companies want you to have experience in before they hire you, so you really need to learn it first hand.
There are a few things you will need to buy: a foot pedal, high quality headphones, and software designed to help you transcribe. I also recommend a good quality computer. If yours is over five years old, consider getting a new one, and you can save money by getting a laptop. I talk about what to buy in more detail in the next section. These are all tax deductible if you are going to start working from home.
Once you have basic training, you can practice on your own by downloading videos or audio files online. Most transcription software comes with the option to be able to transcribe a video, so that can work really well for practice. Listen to audio that has a lot of background noise or the person has a strong accent. The more you hear, the more you will train yourself how to recognize accents and to filter out background noise.
Watch out for unscrupulous companies
I unfortunately learned the hard way that there are companies out there who are either flat out scamming you or are forcing you to be a subcontractor while treating you like an employee, which is illegal. My problem was the latter. So here are some tips I've found both online and in my own experiences to think about.
You shouldn't have to pay ANY company to work for them. I cannot emphasize this enough. Just as with pyramid schemes and those get-rich-quick offers, a company that requires you to pay them should set off all kinds of warning alarms. Most of these companies are not operating with good ethics and morals and are preying on unsuspecting potential employees by underpaying them and expecting them to finish large loads of work.
The only things you will need to buy are products for yourself to keep: your computer, Microsoft Office (most transcription companies use Word and Excel for files and invoices), a foot pedal, quality headphones, and an audio playback program like
ExpressScribe, of which the basic version is flat out free. There's also
Start/Stop, which can sell you an entire package for the at-home transcriptionist. If you are expected to transcribe audio cassettes, then you can find those machines online. I spent $700 on a good laptop and got Office 365, I have an external hard drive that I keep my transcription data on, I paid about $80 for a high-quality set of headphones, and my foot pedal was about $40.
Sometimes a company will help provide these products for you, or they will point you in the right direction to where to get these products. However, if a company is forcing you to pay for special software or products, or even forcing you to pay them to train you, don't do it. Especially don't do it if they expect you to give back the products if you have to quit or are let go. You paid for them, they should belong to you.
In conclusion...
Overall, if you are truly interested in working from home, I highly recommend the website
Rat Race Rebellion. They are a very real website that posts information for legitimate work-from-home jobs. And it's not just for transcription--there are jobs for blogging, call centers, customer service, accounting, and other large areas of work. If you already have experience in any of the areas listed on their site, you can spend time looking there before worrying about getting training for transcription.
Please understand that transcription is not as easy as it sounds. It does take a certain type of mentality to be able to work at home and keep yourself focused and organized. Some people need outside motivation that a "regular" job gives you, and that's perfectly okay. However, if you really feel like you can do it after all of the pros and cons listed here, then I say go for it. For me, the pros outweigh the cons. I'm more happy in a job I love than I am in one that pays a lot more. The sacrifices I make to work at home are a lot easier to deal with than the sacrifices I have to make if I work in a regular corporate environment. And really, that's what we all want in life: to get paid doing something you love to do.
