What If You Don't Attend An Accredited Medical Transcription Training Program?

I believe that one of the most important decision you can make when considering a career as a medical transcriptionist is the school you will attend

. Pick the wrong school and finding work just got a lot harder, and you may not even really be well enough trained to get off to a good start on the job.

What do you do if you pick a program that doesn't seem to be enough to land you a job as a transcriptionist after graduation?

The first thing you need to do is figure out what the problem is. Look back at the course you took. Who accredited it? Was it AHDI Approved? Did you just pick a cheap course to go easy on your budget?

Then look at what you learned in training. Did you learn anatomy, medical terminology, proper formatting for reports, physiology, disease processes and the legal and ethical considerations you should be aware of as a medical transcriptionist? How many reports did you transcribe as practice during your training? Was a CMT involved in the school at all?

Many people make the mistake of simply picking a poor quality school. It's hard to blame students when this happens to them; they found what they thought would be a good program and were duped by false promises. It can happen to the best of us when we want something that badly.

Low quality training has a huge impact on your ability to find that first job. If you hoped to work at home as a medical transcriptionist, as so many do, you might have to take an in-office job to get that valuable experience. Doing so may not be what you want to do, but it's that or pay for a better quality course.

I don't mean that in-office jobs are any easier to get. But they do offer the advantage of having other transcriptionists around you. With poor training you're still going to struggle to succeed as a transcriptionist no matter where you work. Having others around you to help you in person means that at least you can pick up the skills you should have gotten from training much sooner. You'll just have to somehow find a job willing to give you that chance.

If you find a job, you will quickly learn that real dictation is even more challenging than practice dictation. Not all practice dictation is created equal, and there's just something different about typing up the real thing even when you had quality practice.

Being challenged means that your transcription speed may go down. If you had good training, your speed should quickly increase, but if you weren't trained properly you're going to struggle for a long time. This will probably impact your income.

Don't assume that just because you're having a hard time finding a job or on the job that your training wasn't good enough. Some people blame the training when they really need to look in a mirror. The best training won't do you any good if you don't take the fullest advantage of what is offered and work hard. If you took a poor quality course and still didn't work hard, you're just going to be in trouble in your job hunt.

If it becomes clear to you that you made a mistake in choosing a medical transcription online course by not choosing an AHDI Approved course, you have some choices. You can keep going with it and hope that you find a way to make it work anyhow. You can see about getting your money back (difficult in most cases, good luck!). You can even decide to start fresh with an AHDI Approved course and use whatever you did learn to help you get better scores in your new classes.

There's more than one way to learn in life. Sometimes the mistakes we make are lessons to help us do better in the future. If you've made a mistake in the kind of medical transcriptionist course you've selected, don't give up. Take the lesson for what it's worth and find a way to keep moving forward with your life.

by: Stephanie Foster

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