Friday, August 8, 2008

MEDICAL TRANSCRIPTION

I never thought working having my wife work from home as a medical transcriptionist could be so rewarding. Sure, we all have dreams of working from home. The ten second commute, the comfort of dressing casually and not having anyone looking over your shoulder constantly or second guessing the timing of your next bathroom break. I mean who needs the hassle? Unfortunately for most of us, the work from home option is just not a real option. I mean we have bills to pay, and a lifestyle to support and our boss is, well, let's not get too personal here, but our boss is simply not interested in letting us live the work from home lifestyle.

I can tell you from experience that the work from home environment changes everything. It adds so much flexibility and peace of mind that you wonder why you didn't make the sacrifice to get it done years before. You immediately escape the daily commute (both ways) and the perfunctory appearances and the mandatory glad handing. To work at home is as real as it gets. None of that phony stuff. Pretending to enjoy being somewhere we really don't want to be is hard on our emotional psyche and our self esteem. We are not being true to ourselves or our dreams.

As my wife and I were researching our options, it quickly became clear that there were a very limited number of plausible options to be able to work from home. Stuffing envelopes at home was a total hoax. Amway and other multi-level marketing plans lacked a certain appeal. We were looking for something more professional. A work from home career that you could feel good about while making a good living. It had to be a work from home job that was in demand and that required specialized training that could be acquired part time and at our own pace and that would preclude just any warm body off the streets from entering into the business and competing with us and watering down our wages.

After a lot of painstaking thought and effort we narrowed our list of work from home options down to one single opportunity: Medical transcription.

The fact that almost 100% of medical transcriptionists work from home had a huge appeal. The fact that medical transcription is an extremely high growth career in the healthcare profession was even better. This meant job security. And the fact that it only required 9-12 months of specialized part-time training to get started sold us.

We couldn't wait to get started!

Unfortunately, at that time there were not many formalized training programs available. That was the bad news. The good news is that my wife's mother had been doing medical transcription for many years. The opportunity was right under our nose all this time -- we had just never done the research. And more importantly, the timing was finally starting to be right for us. We had two small children at home and one on the way.

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