A community of 30,000 US Transcriptionist serving Medical Transcription Industry


Online MT courses for certification.... - me in va


Posted: Jun 14, 2012

Does anyone know if there are any online MT courses for certification that have financial aid?  Most of the ones I have come across so far have no financial aid, want payment up front, or want at least 200/month payment, which I cant do.  I was a MT for about 10 years, got out of it for a couple of years, and cannot seem to get a job now that I would like to return to it, so thought getting certified would help.  With our financial state though, I cannot afford a big payment of any kind.  Any suggestions?  Thanks.

me in va - sm

[ In Reply To ..]
Your problem getting a job may be more related to the economy than anything else, but you did not say why you are not being hired. Are you failing employment tests? If that is the case, then why not just brush up using the materials the SUM program publishes? There are specialty dictation tapes and others available.

It is not clear what you mean by certification. If you mean the CMT, you can review on your own and just take the exam. I am not sure the actual certification would help you get a job. It would be the review that helped.

If you mean taking a course to get a certificate of completion, be careful that you do not make your situation worse by taking a course that offers easy financial aid but will leave you stuck with debt and still unable to get a job. Employers pretty much only accept graduates of Andrews and M-TEC.

If you need a job now, taking a course is going to delay you for perhaps a year. What would the point of that be? The MT job market would be even worse. If you are going to take that long, you might as well switch to something else.

If you still think that taking a course will help, remember that it isn't the course diploma that gets the job as much as what you learned from it. Many MTs in your boat think that they already know MT, so they can just skate the course to get the piece of paper. They then discover that they fail employment tests anyway. The diploma only gets employers to allow you to test--you still have to pass the test.

If you are already an MT, you know how to transcribe. Your problem getting a job is not that you are not a CMT and it is not that you do not have a diploma. It is something else . . . your test scores, your resume, your interview, your experience, the employer's assessment of your ability, or something. An expensive course is not going to fix that. You need to figure out what the problem really is and address it.

Do some reading on this board about the salaries you can expect today, too. Do you really want to spend time and effort for that?

Im not really sure.... - me in va

[ In Reply To ..]
Most of them say I dont have the experience necessary for what they are looking for. What gets me is one of the companies that told me this had hired me in the past, (at the time I only had dial-up which was TOO slow for their platform) but now they said b/c I dont have heavy operative experience that I dont qualify for the position. I have not had extensive operatives, but I HAVE done operatives. You cannot work 10 years as and MT and NOT do operatives.

If I have failed any of the tests they have not told me that, and I do not believe that is the case.

I have occasionally wondered if my last employer is giving me a bad reference as at the time I stopped working for them I was going through some serious emotional issues over my son being molested, going through court, etc. and became extremely depressed and kind of just shut down and never gave a notice, which, of course I regret, but at the time I could barely get out of bed for a while there.

So, really, Im not sure what the reasoning is that I cant seem to get a job. I was not a job hopper, most of that 10 years was spent with one company, so I just do not know. Thanks.


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