Medical Transcriptionist - Independent Contractor
Pros
You are left alone to do your work at your own pace, and set your own hours. They do expect one weekend day, twice a month. The production bonus is very easy to achieve. There is a mix of VR and straight transcription, primarily VR. They do make every effort to assign you to accounts that match your skill level and interests by specialty. The tech support is knowledgeable, calming and helpful when something goes wrong. My supervisor was responsive and patient.
Cons
The telephone conference group training (a full 8 hours on a Saturday) was hurried, overwhelming and quite confusing and as a result, retention was poor. This is not the best fit for everyone's learning style or for those of us of a certain age. It tended to assume everyone was already familiar with and utilizing multiple keyboard shortcuts instead of a mouse, and discussions of these shortcuts would overlap and intermingle with instruction on the actual platform. As a result, it was hard to tell them apart and prioritize. I spent time copying out numerous shortcut key combos when the time would have been better spent making a clear set of notes on how to operate the actual PLATFORM, as that was the more immediate priority. This was not clearly explained and my resultant notes were a murky, hastily-scrawled hodgepodge. Secondly I found some of the feedback from QA to be vague, ambiguous or contradictory as in "this is wrong" but no specific indication of what was wrong with it or how to correct and prevent it recurring in the future. A lot of unpaid time was spent trying to paraphrase bits of confusing QA feedback in e-mails to my supervisor, in the hopes of decoding it. I found the demand for an almost inhumanly high accuracy rate to be somewhat ominous, stressful and punitive, like waiting for an axe to fall.
