Top questions asked and answered by our Transcription Team!
Q: What makes a great transcriptionist in terms of traits, attitudes and aptitudes?
Transcription is really difficult. It’s not unskilled; being a fast, accurate typist is a necessary skill, but it’s not sufficient—by itself, it’s not going to mean someone will make a good transcriptionist at all.
As a transcriptionist, you need to have a good ear. It helps if you’re familiar with different accents, both foreign and from other regions of the country. You need to be a critical thinker. You need to understand when something actually makes sense in context. You can’t just keep typing. Some people are good typists, but they’ll just keep typing, no matter what they’re hearing, and they don’t stop and ask, “Whoa, does this make any sense? They couldn’t have possibly said this.”
You also need good grammar and research skills, and you need to be comfortable using resources, have computer skills, know how to get around in Word, how to use auto-correct or text expanders, or at least be willing to learn these things. You must enjoy learning. You need good time management and organizational skills. You need a good, quiet place to work!
On top of all of this, which is your base of the pyramid, the people who succeed are the ones who really want to do it. They’re not people who just need it to make an extra $100 a week. Those people, really, are not successful because it’s not a simple or easy job. There is a learning curve, and transcriptionists need to commit to it to do well.
Q: Is it possible to acquire those skills along the way, or do I just need to show up, day one, having all that knowledge?
It’s not so much knowledge as a skill set. You wouldn’t have to have any information about auto-corrects or text expanders, for example, because we could point you in the right direction there, and that’s just helping you with production. But the rest of it you kind of need right off the bat. Those are skills you could have acquired by just being the kind of person who likes to research things on his or her own time, such as reading news articles, books about history or grammar, or even mystery novels.
You may be one of those people who have these skills without ever having transcribed. You can be a total beginner and either have a good ear for accents or enjoy watching TV shows with people from other countries—anything like that would really be helpful. If you live in a little town somewhere, let’s say, in the middle of the country, and only see people and listen to people from that town, it’s going to be more difficult for you. We’ve actually seen that happen. You may not have ever heard anybody speak with a foreign-to-you accent. You can learn it, but you’d have to want to put in that extra time, and it can become a stumbling block.
Q: In what areas do you see transcriptionists struggle?
The main struggle is getting new transcriptionists up to production speed. First, they want to make sure they have all of their skills down, they know how to do research, they know what their company’s formatting standards are, and then they have to try and get faster to make money. It seems that people who, when they are released from coaching, if they really concentrate right away and put the time in, their production goes right up. However, some people just fizzle out.
It may have to do with how many hours they commit, but the people who are going to be successful seem to be the ones who manage to put the time in and get their production up fairly quickly. They want to make money, which means they need to get their production up, and then that will make them happy and successful. The longer it takes them, the more frustrated they become.
Q: For someone who’s going to do well, how quickly do you see them get up to production speed?
You can actually do it in a couple of weeks. Set it as your personal goal. For example, if you’re just starting, give yourself two weeks to make your minimum pages. Otherwise, the longer you give yourself, the more frustrated you’re going to get. How much more than the minimum you do depends on how much money you want to make, so start by setting specific weekly goals for yourself right away.
Q: Any other tips you have for someone considering a career in transcription?
Brush up on your MS Word skills. Make sure that you’re good at using that program. The other tip is to go online and work with practice audios. You have many great options available to you online. Express Scribe has some on their site. Try it out and see if you like it. You can find practice files here that are legal in nature, and try to transcribe those just to get a sense of what transcribing is like.
