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Stop studying for expensive obsolete skills!

To anyone seeking a way to earn a respectable dollar by working from home while caring for family, nothing is as enticing as a classified ad promising online training that will lead to a flood of high paying job prospects. Fortunately, with today’s Internet and Google, learning more about a prospective school and typical experiences of its grads is relatively easy and can keep you from investing time and money in a disappointing deal.
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To anyone seeking a way to earn a respectable dollar by working from home while caring for family, nothing is as enticing as a classified ad promising online training that will lead to a flood of high paying job prospects. Fortunately, with today’s Internet and Google, learning more about a prospective school and typical experiences of its grads is relatively easy and can keep you from investing time and money in a disappointing deal.

Here’s a typical ad:

Medical Transcription! In-demand career! Employers have work-at-home positions available. Get online training you need from an employer-trusted program. Visit: CareerStep to start training for your work-at-home career today!

Who could resist? You might, after reading students’ comments posted on ca.trustpilot.com.

Contrary to this school’s ad, the work of medical transcriptionist – work I enjoyed for 14 years in pre-Chretien times — is phasing out faster than plastic straws in restaurants. Dictating reports is passe. Doctors chart digitally themselves. Others use voice recognition where the computer types what the doctor speaks.

Students note they need work experience to be hired, up to three years in some cases, but the old Catch-22 arises – how do they gain job experience if no one will hire them? Pay rate is pathetic.

Another student said, “Upon graduation, it was frustrating to see two-thirds of the companies that CareerStep “places” you in are no longer in business. The other one-third either don’t take resumes from anyone with less than three to five years of experience, or pay so little with so few hours that it is discouraging. Not to mention the fact that those jobs each have 20 or more applicants that you hope to stand out from.”

Posts another student, “CareerStep will keep accepting your money even when they know that there are no jobs that you as a student from CareerStep will ever be offered. MY ADVICE IS DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME OR MONEY. This place is a diploma mill.”

Students waited weeks for an instructor to reply to a question. “The school is attentive until your payment plan ends, then they ignore you.”

Instead of enrolling in work as outdated as crafting buggy whips find an online course in the rising trend, real-time reporting.

Real-time reporters produce the ‘crawl’ you read on the bottom of your TV screen during live events and broadcasts, such as newscasts, conferences, weather emergencies and sports events for the benefit of deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals.

In addition, real-time reporters are in demand in courtrooms.

And real-time reporting is commonly used for webcasting, the act of providing real-time captioning for web-based live events, such as product introductions, corporate sales meetings, training seminars, and press conferences.

A typist working at home using a special typewriter, and computer connected electronically to a TV broadcaster anywhere, even in the U.S., listens to the broadcast and simultaneously types the words spoken.

Pay rates can range as high as $85 per hour.

Distance training in this growing field was available in both Vancouver and Edmonton a couple of years ago. I am unable to say if such training is available online anywhere at the moment. NAIT in Alberta offers a full time course on campus.