Tips for Your Medical Transcription Job Search

By Anne Martinez from Medical Transcription For Dummies

A really annoying phrase is included in more online medical transcription job listings than not: “At least X years of experience required.” The value of X ranges from one to seven, with two being most common.

What do you do if you don’t have any experience at all yet? First, stop looking at those job boards. There are much better places to start a medical transcription job search, especially if you’re a new graduate.

If you’ve trained appropriately, landing your first medical transcription job isn’t nearly as daunting as those job listings may lead you to believe. Naturally, one of your first tasks will be to create or polish up your résumé. However, all the polishing in the world won’t make work experience magically appear on it.

The good news is that a temporary blank spot won’t prevent you from getting a job, if you can do well on a pre-employment test. As long as you did well in medical transcription school, passing these tests is mostly a matter of knowing what to expect and applying the strategies in this chapter to give yourself a leg up.

No matter how eager you are to get started, grabbing the first job offer that comes along without fully evaluating it first is a mistake. It may be the perfect position for you, or it may be a nightmare waiting to happen.

Keep a log of potential jobs

When you’re interacting with multiple potential employers at once, a log file can be a lifesaver (and a face-saver). It doesn’t need to be anything fancy, just a place to keep track of your contacts and progress (or lack thereof) with various job prospects.

A word-processing document, a spreadsheet, or even a notebook will suffice. Spreadsheets are a particularly flexible option because it’s easy to sort the entries by company name, date, status, or any other column you care to create.

As soon as you get a new job lead, add it to your log. Record an initial brief description of the company, the type of work it does, and where you got the lead. Add names and contact details as you obtain them. Going forward, keep notes about your interactions with each potential employer.

Include the date, type of interaction (submitted résumé, had a phone interview, took a test, and so on), with whom, and any comments. You don’t need to write a book, but record enough so that if they call you out of the blue three weeks from now, you’ll know where you left off. Remember to periodically make a backup copy of the entire log, even if simply by printing it out.

Create a cheat sheet for job interviews

As you complete applications and interviews, you’ll find yourself repeatedly fielding the same questions from different employers. Make it easy on yourself and reuse your answers. Keep them in a text document so you can paste them into an online application form or e-mail and feel confident that they’re 100 percent grammatically correct and typo free.