I went to www.careerstep.com for training and it's a VERY good school. A lot of MT companies want you to have 3+ years experience before they hire you but if you graduate from CS then they waive that 3 year requirement so you definitely can get a job after graduation. If you work directly for a doctor's office or hospital...some still use tapes but most use digital recordings now so you get a wav. file.

They have to have a secure way of sending the files to you because of the HIPAA privacy act. Then you need an audio player like Express Scribe to play the audio, a foot pedal helps for playing/rewinding/fast forwarding the audio. If you work for an MT company, normally they have a program that they have you put on your computer. The doctors do their dictations and the dictations upload to the program on your computer. You then can listen and transcribe the reports and send them back to the doctor. Very easy that way.

It took me a year to graduate from CS but it can take a few months or more than a year if you want. It goes by the pace of how you study and how much time you have to put into the course. It's all online so it's easy to work and go to school.

There are 3 top schools people get hired from they are Andrews, M-Tec and Career Step. You can go to www.ahdionline.org, they have a lot of information on there about MT. You can sign up to get on the CS forums and check things out on there too. CS will send you more info if you fill out some stuff on their site. Check out www.transcriptionessentials.com too they have a lot of information about transcription. They have job postings & lists of transcription companies that do legal transcription, medical transcription and general transcription.

You don't need any formal training to get into general transcription. They post overflow work on the forum and a lot of them will hire people with little or no experience for a few contract jobs. Usually the pay for that is per audio hour. One hour of audio can take 4-6 hours to transcribe but you only get paid for that 1 audio hour so make sure the pay is worth it.

Typical pay for that is $50 starting out and it just keeps going up and up from there. I've seen pay for entertainment transcription at $180 an audio hour. Takes experience to get into that but the experience is pretty easy to get. I've done transcription for Comedy Central, American Idol, Apple, CNet, HGTV....the list goes on. It can be very interesting stuff! :)