It's not day labor . . .
Posted By: sm on 2008-08-28
In Reply to: Thinking of MT - Dixie
MT isn't day labor. It's a difficult job that requires experience and considerable practice to reach the point where you have marketable skills, and then more practice in order to improve to the point that you can earn a decent living from it.
You pretty much need to be working consistently to be able to get experience and keep it up to date. Every time you came back to work, you would be so rusty it would take weeks to get back up to speed.
Services typically do not have pools. If they did, they'd be unable to predict when people would work or how much they would work. That wouldn't be very good for business. The work isn't done casually on a "whenever" basis.
MT is not a good choice if you are not able to commit to serious training and a consist schedule.
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The Department of Labor website
has tables that should answer your question. There is no absolute answer. There are so many variables that responses from individual MTs would apply strictly to those MTs with their particular skills in their particular locations and not necessarily equate to your situation. Best to check the DoL site for your locale.
Try the FTC or your state's Department of Labor and Industry.
I think the FTC is www.ftc.org
Well, all I can say is the Board of Labor Statistics should visit our hospital where
an entire radiology department went to VR with Dictaphone's platform and within 30 DAYS were dictating their own stuff without ANY MT EDITING. Including the high-speed dictator, the Pakistani dictator who doesn't even WANT to do it, and the lazy slurring dictator. I think in light of my own experience, the Labor Board is behind the times. The statement below is no longer true.
"In spite of the advances in this technology, the software has been slow to grasp and analyze the human voice and the English language, and the medical vernacular with all its diversity. As a result, there will continue to be a need for skilled medical transcriptionists to identify and appropriately edit the inevitable errors created by speech recognition systems, and to create a final document."
Board of Labor Statistics has a generalized view-
would hardly say they have their finger on the MT market pulse.
the US Labor Dept does a little blurb on thousands of jobs...
you can see that they certainly don't have their pulse on the MT field like people who have been living it and breathing it for the past 20 years. I've been in it since the 80's, in my first IC job started at 9 cpl, now can't even BID a job for 11 cpl as I get outbid. However my biggest account just told me they are trialing a speech recognition system. I looked at some of the test runs and darned if the thing isn't working quite well. So there goes $100,000 a year for myself and five of my MT's. There's no security in this market. Your service can lose an account **snap** like that and then you scramble to try to get another...so I know you think you've got what it takes, but it's like trying to get an acting job when the rest of the world is watching cartoons...So....I'm in nursing school....
umm...I hate to tell you this...but further Labor Board stats show wages in 2004
at $29,530. They were $23,500 in 1997. So we've gained $6000/yr in 10 years? Woohoo- you're right-- Medical Transcription must not be in trouble.
"Compensation varies not only among regions of the country, but among types of employers as well. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, medical transcriptionists earned an average salary of $29,530 in 2004. The average hourly wage was $14.20."
"Medical transcriptionists averaged about $ 23,500 in 1997 woking in hospitals, and about $ 22,600 working in offices and clinics of medical doctors."
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