For several years, I've been praying about and thinking about what I'm going to do for my next career. Now that my homeschooling career is drawing to a close, I was starting to feel a little desperate about my next step. But God revealed it at the perfect time, of course. Last month, I applied for a freelance transcriptionist job. The only requirements were good typing and English skills, which are pretty much my only skills. The application involved grammar testing, word usage testing, and transcribing an audio file. It took me about an hour to complete the application process, but I felt good about it when I submitted it.
About thee days later, I heard that I got the job. I was considered a rookie for the first several jobs until I proved I could do it. Rookie pay is very low, and the jobs aren't great (mostly transcribing collect calls from prison inmates). At first, I was pretty slow and not very accurate, but after several jobs, I started getting the hang of it. Yesterday I got promoted to full transcriptionist, so now I'm making more money and getting better jobs.
It's the perfect job for me, because I don't have to get dressed or talk to people, but I get to use my skills and learn interesting things, and I can work as much as I have time to spare. Noah says I like it because I'm nosy. I never considered myself nosy; I just have a well-developed sense of curiosity. But I do enjoy hearing the juicy details of lawsuits as I transcribe the lawyers' audio dictation. My favorite job was transcribing a Holocaust survivor's biography. Very interesting, but difficult, because he had a Polish accent and I had to look up a lot of cities in Poland and Germany and learn to spell them.
As soon as I graduated from rookie status, I became eligible to apply for video captioning, so I applied yesterday. More grammar and word usage tests, plus learning the system for closed captioning and then actually captioning a video. That was more difficult, because there are more rules and the additional step of syncing the words with the video. But if I get that job, I'll have more interesting opportunities.
So for now, I'm going to try to pick up a quick transcription job before I start teaching for the day.
