Transcriptionist

The role of a transcriptionist is to listen to the audio recording, decipher and transcribe audio to text using a software. Its a good career option that you can choose and you can even work from your home or office, if you have outstanding listening skills, competent in more than one language and possess adequate educational qualifications. Business enterprises and educational institutions often outsource transcription services to competent transcriptionists, so that they can save a great deal of time, money and energy in the process. Off-shoring this kind of work to companies often helps to concentrate on other important aspects of business and develop it.

It is mandatory that all the companies maintain an adequate record of various meetings, for further use. This is a welcome change for all those business managers who had to resort to transcribing important documents themselves or perusing them minutely if the work was done by a second party. But outsourcing transcription services lent a professional touch to the work required and produced good results too. Big companies with good infrastructure, however retained in-house transcribers who are well equipped to deal with all kinds of transcription services.

The job of transcribing is made easy when the transcriptionist has an inclination towards the type of transcription service he/she applies for. The transcription services are most prevalent in the following industries : legal, medical, financial, and media. Most of the time, transcription is done in English, so the aspirant should be quite competent in the language, a fast learner of new words, ability to write grammatically correct sentences and sensible enough to follow what is being said.

All transcriptionists believe that in order to do a full transcription there should be no distracting noise in the background. The speaker participating in the recording should speak out with his voice clear and intoned correctly. If the speaker speaks too fast, the transcriber may not be able to capture the essence of the recording. The transcriptionist must be competent enough to recognize the pauses – commas, semi colons, exclamations, periods, parenthesis and other punctuations and use them accordingly.

Just about anybody can become a transcriptionist. He/she must, however have a great deal of professionalism, impeccable listening skills and language/communication skills. The transcriptionist must be quite computer savvy, should ideally have a foot pedal to monitor the speed of the recorder, able to work with the audio and video recorder and able to use the printer if its required. Several transcription courses are offered online and the tests are also taken the same way. It does not take ages to finish, nor does it burn a hole in your pocket. But once you land up a job, it’s a high paying one and you will never run out of chances.