Hi everyone.
Welcome. In this lesson, we’re going to go over transcription resumes. Your resume and cover letter are your first impression, so make them good. Take the time now to create and polish your resume. You want to be ready to apply to companies as soon as companies announce they’re hiring because sometimes their hiring window is only a few days. Investing the time to create a good resume and cover letter will save you time, as you’ll be more likely to land a contract sooner.
Transcription resumes are unique. It’s a common feature for traditional resumes to list all prior job experience. For transcription resumes, you only list transcription or transcription-related experience. It’s more of a skill-based resume. If your last job was in retail, it’s not necessary to put that on your resume even if it was your most recent job. Instead, companies would want to see that you had transcription or secretarial experience, even from a few years ago.
Let’s go over some relevant skills to transcription. Remember how we talked about skills of successful transcriptionists? Some of those skills were being able to research, proofread, and work with word processing programs. So, these are the types of experience that you should highlight if you don’t have any prior transcription experience. List things like experience in editing, formatting Word documents, or writing. If you’ve done volunteer work and have created a monthly newsletter with strict formatting, then that’s more relevant to transcription than if you have worked at McDonald’s, even if the volunteer work was five years ago and you worked at McDonald’s only a few months ago.
So, let’s talk about some resume best practices. First, make your resume simple and easy to read by keeping it on one page. Less is more because if your resume takes too long to look over, then the person who looks it over will just skip it. You can also make it easy to read by using black typing and easy-to-read fonts with the font size at least 10 to 12 points. Also, keep formatting simple and allow plenty of whitespace. Edit your resume to make sure that grammar and punctuation are perfect. Once you’re done, find a friend or family member to look over it to catch any mistakes you might have made.
Make sure that you come across as a professional. An email that’s janedoe@gmail.com is more professional than lovebunny89@gmail.com. Update your resume as you gain experience through contracts, volunteer transcription work, or overflow work. Make sure that you’re being honest about your experience and skills.
Since transcription work is of a confidential nature, most companies will run a background check on you. If you misrepresent your skills or experience, there’s a good chance you won’t get the contract. Another pitfall of being dishonest is that if you gain a challenging contract and then you crash and burn, you won’t get a second chance. Sometimes, it’s better to wait to apply for more challenging contracts until you’re ready for the work. So, that’s a brief intro to transcription resumes. Next, we’ll look at a sample transcription resume.
Click the following link to view the example resume.
