If you have an interest in the medical field and enjoy office work, you should consider a career in medical transcription. Demand in this field continues to grow and each year there are more job opportunities.

Medical transcription clerks quickly and accurately transcribe medical records that are dictated by doctors and other medical professionals. You will be working with clinic notes, physical reports, office notes, consultation reports, operative reports, psychiatric evaluations, laboratory results, pathology reports, and x-ray results to name just some of the record types.

The clerk receives the information on a dictation tape which is then listened to using a Dictaphone machine and transcribed into a word processing program. Different doctors use different word processing software but all have medical dictionaries. There are several that are required including medications, medical definitions, and abbreviations.

In order to do this job you must have good computer and language skills. You must also be well versed in medical terminology, laboratory terms, surgical terms, procedures, and abbreviations. Medical transcription clerks must be accurate as they are responsible for correctly transcribing patient medical records.

You can complete a Medical Transcription certification program online. The length of programs varies depending on the level of training you undertake, but on average they take anywhere from 6 months to 9 months to complete.

You will then be qualified to work in a hospital or medical office as a transcriptionist. There are also job opportunities in the field becoming available online. In the United States you can expect to earn around $10.00 per hour to start, and with just a few years experience this can jump to $20.00 per hour or more. National transcription companies require 2-5 years of hospital experience, but they pay substantially better! Online, in a self employed environment, you can earn up to $40.00 per hour.

Although membership in a professional association is not required, it is recommended. The AAMT, The American Association for Medical Transcription, was founded in 1978 and provides you with the bimonthly Journal of the Association for American Medical Transcription, discounts on professional services and products, access to educational conferences and seminars, access to AAMT professional staff, and the opportunity to become a Certified Medical Transcriptionist.

If a career in medical transcription is for you, check with the many online universities about their program requirements.

Many people think they can get into the medical transcription industry easily, make good money and live happily ever after. Surely you’ve seen this type of message before with people selling correspondence courses. Can you really make a good living with medical transcription? In this article, we’ll go into the good and the bad of the medical transcription industry and see if itz’s for you or not.

Medical transcription is a challenging and rewarding career and the demand for it just keeps growing. there are more than enough jobs out there for anyone willing to make a career in medical transcription.

But many people come into this line of work and think they can make a career out of it just because the demand is high. Then they start going through the process and find that it’s a lot harder than they anticipated.

They thought it would be an easy way to make good money . It is a way to make money, but with anything worth something, it’s not always easy.

One of the drawbacks of medical transcription is that it takes training and continuing education. This alone scares many would-be medical transcriptionists away from the field. It takes dedication and a willingness to learn and keep learning. At some point you have to ask yourself  “If the demand is high and the supply of medical transcriptionists are low, why isn’t everyone getting into this?”.

This is the very reason. It’s not easy. It’s rewarding, but it’s not easy.

Usually, it takes six months to get a handle on the medical terminology and the different medical conditions, drugs, procedures, tests, and treatments that are required by the field.

Another hurdle is the fact that the medical industry is constantly advancing  and constantly changing. Being able to adapt to new medical treatments, drugs and terminology is imperative to your success with medical transcription.

There are mail order medical transcription courses out there and many professionals indorse them, but it’s best to go the “hands on ” route while learning medical transcription. On the job training or a college teaching it in your area would be the best way to learn. You can get the much needed hands on experience that you can’t get with a correspondence course.

While a mail order course may be helpful, it doesn’t take the place of a live human being helping you learn the basics and beyond.

Medical transcription clearly isn’t for everybody. If you’re serious about earning a good living with a high income career, you should take a close look at it.

A Medical Transcriptionists career could pay off well for those seeking to update their career training. As thousands of jobs are being outsourced and sent overseas in every sector, for those fortunate enough to be within the employment ranks as medical transcriptionists, this sector is projected to grow faster than average for all jobs through 2013. Demand for medical transcription services will be fueled by a growing and aging population. Older age groups receive more medical tests, treatments, and procedures that require documentation. A high level of demand for transcription services also will be sustained by the continued need for electronic documentation that can easily be shared among providers, third-party payers, regulators, consumers, and health information systems.

Growing numbers of medical transcriptionists will be needed to and identify discrepancies in medical reports, amend patients’ records, and edit documents from speech recognition systems . An increasing demand for standardized records should result in rapid employment growth in physicians’ offices, especially in large group practices. Medical transcriptionists held strong employment representation with about 105,000 jobs in 2004. About 4 out of 10 worked in hospitals and another 3 out of 10 worked in offices of physicians. Others worked for business support services; medical and diagnostic laboratories; outpatient care centers; and offices of physical, occupational and speech therapists, and audiologists.Compensation methods for medical transcriptionists vary. Some are paid based on the number of hours they work or on the number of lines they transcribe. The higher earners can forseeably expect more than $20 an hour.

Work conditions that some would envy are what many Medical Transcriptionist encounter. Professional transcriptionist can look forward to working in comfortable settings such as hospitals, physicians’ offices, transcription service offices, clinics, laboratories, medical libraries, government medical facilities, or their own homes. Many medical transcriptionists telecommute from home-based offices as employees or subcontractors for hospitals and transcription services or as self-employed, independent contractors.

Many medical transcriptionists work a standard 40-hour week. Self-employed medical transcriptionists are more likely to work irregular hours—including part time, evenings, weekends, or on call at any time. The future of medical transcriptionist jobs appear to be healthy and bright and shows no sign up declining anytime in the foreseeable future.

Whether you are about to graduate from college, or want to change jobs at a later point in life, career planning is a very important aspect of the process.  Before you actually start applying for positions, it is essential to be certain of the areas you would like to work in.  The worst thing that could happen is not to take any steps in the career planning process, and end up in a job that you are unhappy with, or do not have the proper skill set for.

Career quizzes are often helpful in the career planning process.  These are often a great first step when trying to determine what type of jobs you’d be best suited for.  Many are available online, and address some of the following areas:  identifying your skills and abilities; determining if you prefer working with people, data or things; or summarizing what workplace values are most important to you.  By compiling all of this information, you’ll usually get a general idea of what fields you should be seriously checking out.  The quizzes often list suitable occupations based on your answers.

One avenue that would be best to explore is signing up for career counseling.  There are many free services, mainly ones offered by the government, or at post-secondary institutions, that will get you started on your career planning journey.  Career counselors are trained professionals that will be able to offer you advice and make realistic recommendations on what area you would be best suited to work in.  They will look over your academic training, and often administer aptitude tests to see what careers you should be exploring.

Researching companies that you could picture yourself working for is another great step in the career planning process.  Check out their websites for information, and to see what type of positions they may be hiring for.  When possible, try to set up a meeting with a member of the department you’d like to be a part of, so that you may ask them questions and find out about the day to day aspects of the company on a more intimate level.  Check the newspapers and magazines to see if the company is mentioned at all, and see if the articles are favorable or not.  Although this may seem very simple, it can be a valuable part of your career planning.

If you think you may need to go back to school in order to make a career change, obtaining a catalogue from a local post-secondary institution is a good way to kick start career planning.  Look through what programs are offered, what skills are required to be accepted to programs of interest, and what type of a time commitment you’d be looking at in order to make this change.  See if prior employment or life experience will work in your favor, and give you advanced standing into your selected programs.  People often forget to check into educational requirements for certain careers, and may waste time and energy by skipping this step in the career planning process.

An often underrated aspect of career planning is talking with your friends and family.  Discuss with them in detail what it is they do, and ask them to honestly tell you what they could picture you doing for a living.  Who knows? They may see something that you’ve overlooked, and it could be the missing link to your career planning process.

Career planning is something that everyone is faced with at some point in their lives, and it should not be taken lightly, although you can have some fun with it.  Most important of all is to be honest and realistic with yourself, and make sure you ultimately choose a path that will make you happy and keep you financially secure.

Have you ever felt stuck in your career? Employee stress and burn out can account for a lot of dissatisfaction in your life. After all, you are at work some 8 hours a day or more. That’s 1/3 of your day if you don’t count sleep. That’s a long time to be dissatisfied.

If you feel stuck, here are 6 great ways to find your ideal career:

1. Brainstorm on a sheet of paper - I’ve talked about this before and it’s a strategy I use all the time. Take a pad of paper and write down at the top your objective in question form. Then, simply list out 20 answers to your question. For example, you could write “What should I be doing with my time and life?” Then stay seated for a half hour to an hour coming up with answers to that question. The key to this exercise is coming up with 20 answers - don’t quit until you have 20 answers. You can repeat every day until you get the answer you seek.

2. Ask 3 close friends - Sometimes our friends know us better than ourselves. While meeting with one of your friends, mention you are at a crossroads in your life and career. Ask what they think you’d enjoy doing. You might be surprised at how easily they can zero in to your strengths and abilities and report a perfect job area.

3. Ask your boss and coworkers - much like your friends in the example above, your boss and coworkers most likely see you in a way you do not see yourself. In fact, they are likely most familiar with your strengths and weaknesses in the work environment. Compile all the answers you get from them and see if there are any common threads you can explore.

4. Call a headhunter - If you are searching in your career, it’s likely you have a resume. Sometimes you can catch a headhunter or recruiter during their slow times and meet with them to pick through what you might be good at. I’ve done this at different times in my life and the people seem open to talking with people. After all, if you don’t get paid, they don’t either. The ideas I get are usually good.

5. Take a career assessment test - There are several sites on the Internet you might be able to take one of these tests for a fee. But using my ‘headhunter’ tip above, many headhunters have this software and don’t mind you taking the test in their office. I’ve taken these tests two times in my life and they usually take an hour or two, but they are thorough. They ask you to answer a series of questions about what you are good at, what you like to do, what you prefer doing over what you don’t. If you take one, you will likely see some new exciting areas to explore in your life.

6. Keep a journal - Do you keep a journal? If so, read through, looking for common threads in your writing. Keep your eyes peeled for trends and activities you like as well as don’t like. In fact, finding examples of what you don’t like and what frustrates you is almost as important as finding what you do like. For example, if you hate an overwhelming boss, you’d probably like a self-directed position. If you hate nosy coworkers you’d probably prefer your own office.

Discovering what you really want to do with your life is the most important decision you can make. We spend 1/3 or more of our lives at work. So figuring out the right career is important to keeping that 1/3 of our lives happy and productive.