MT

Some schools offer more hands-on transcription training than others, and that's one way to compare them.

Andrews:

1048 reports

3412 minutes of dictation with another 1500 optional minutes.

2425 minutes of dictation with another 300 reports and another optional 1000 minutes of dictation.

Career Step:

639 reports

1920 minutes

4. Your education.
You get what you pay for and there are good schools out there. Check the AAMT site for their input on what constitutes a good school.

5.Money and time management.
Can you budget your income for the times when the work flow is less than optimum? As in any production-based industry, there will be times when the work is not as plentiful as other times. In fact, there will even be times when you are flooded with work and might need to work longer hours than usual to meet your turn-around-time so you also need to be a good time manager.
In the lean times can you and would you be willing to work at other things to supplement your income from medical transcription? Your medical trancription education will translate into many job opportunities in many other medical-related fields that sometimes need additional help.

6. Your adaptability.
Can you easily change gears when necessary and learn the idiocycracies of each dictator/account so that you manage your work flow with efficacy? If necessary, could you and would you take on other temporary work to help supplement your income from medical transcription?

7. Your need for benefits.
Do you have or need life and/or medical insurance or can you be put on someone else's insurance?

1. Your attitude.
Can you sit at a keyboard for long hours typing what someone else has dictated? Can you refrain from the impulse to discuss with any other human being what you hear in those dictations, regardless of the integrity of that person, because it violates the patient's confidentiality? Can you take constructive criticism from others in order to advance your knowledge and abilities?

2. Your speed and accuracy in keyboarding (macros and expanders help here). Also a good working knowledge of grammar and punctuation are important.

3. Your ability to quickly find the correct answer(s).
A good hard copy library, good internet searching skills, good software are extremely important for your success but you need the knowledge of how to use them efficiently. A good school will teach you how to do this. Also, of help, are these boards after you have checked every other resource you have access to.

It was a struggle when I first started. I figured I was probably making about $3.00 an hour, but after I got used to my doctors and got my macros together, I average about $23.00 an hour.

One thing that also seemed to help me was to not obsess over my line counts.  When I stopped watching so closely and counted less often, I definitely did better and felt less stressed about it as well.

Line counts do increase.  They just do.