The types of work settings where you find medical transcriptionists might surprise you. While the first place you might think to find medical transcriptionists is probably a doctor’s office, transcriptionists are also employed at hospitals, clinics, labs, medical libraries, governmental medical facilities and the offices of medical transcription service companies. But here’s the real surprise: many medical transcriptionists are allowed to work from home as telecommuters, creating their own home offices. In fact, the ability to work from home is the reason more and more people are choosing careers in this industry.

Highly trained and educated, medical transcriptionists are considered a valued and necessary part of a health care team, often working for or alongside surgeons, pharmacists, physicians, nurses, psychologists, and other medical professionals. Some may even eventually choose to work in a college setting, training students.

No matter if the transcriptionist works at a traditional office or an office in his or her home, they must be productive enough to stay on top of large workloads, organized and accurate enough to attend to the vital nature of their work, and diligent enough to remain focused while sitting in the same position for long periods of time. The advantages of working from home, as you can imagine, include saving money on gas and setting your own dress code, not to mention the convenience and comfort you experience outside a rigid office setting.

In most settings, medical transcriptionists work a typical 40 hours per week, but if the transcriptionist is self-employed, they can set their own hours to work weekends, evenings, part-time or be simply on-call. Of course, self-employed transcriptionists have to invest in their own specialized transcribing equipment, whereas in offices, the equipment is often provided.

As the job market for medical transcriptionists grows, newly-trained transcriptionists should be able to choose from a greater variety of these many options. In fact, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment of medical transcriptionists to grow 14 percent from 2006 through 2016, which is faster than the average for all occupations the Bureau tracks. As with many other careers in the health care industry, this growth has a lot to do with demand created by the aging of the baby boomers, who will need to schedule more doctor’s visits as they age, creating more work for transcriptionists. Having a background in some other health care occupation, and extensive knowledge of medical terminology, is helpful for a new medical transcriptionist and should open up more options for where you can work.