How Quickly do Career Step Students Get Jobs After Graduation? Part One

by Hava Lyon | More from this Blogger

23 Jul 2007 10:42 PM

I thought I had finished up with the medical transcription series a while ago but I continue to get e-mails and comments with questions that I guess I forgot to answer the first time around (how, I don't know, because I wrote over 50 blogs on the subject, but I still managed to somehow skip over some things. I think it must be some sort of heretofore untapped "talent" or something. Not a particularly useful talent, but there you go.) I get two questions frequently, so I thought I would answer one in this blog, and one in the next:

"As I am always a skeptic, do you know what percentage of students get jobs directly after completing the CS program?"

The short answer is no. I really don't. I was a student at Career Step for 18 months and was fairly good friends with several of the administrators there, but I never thought to ask that question, and it's a fairly vague question anyway (does "directly" mean within a week? Two weeks? A month? Three months? What if someone gets a job offer but they turn it down - does that count? I'm not saying the question isn't valid, because if a school graduates a lot of students but none of them ever get jobs, then you absolutely need to know that. It's just that it's a hard question to answer.)

So I don't have any hard evidence or facts to point to, but I can tell you my own experiences. I was extremely active in the CS forums for a long time (I had put up over 1400 posts while a student there) and I got to know a lot of people, long-time posters who started the course and posted all throughout their schooling, posted when they graduated, and then posted when they got jobs. Almost universally, the time between graduation and being offered a job was within a month, and many times it was within a few weeks. I knew a blessed few who had been offered a job within days of graduation. That was fairly rare, but actually did happen to several of my friends.

There were exceptions, where the student would look for several months before finding something, and the reasons for those exceptions have been talked about on here before: If you are looking for part-time work, you will have a harder time finding work than if you are looking for full-time work. If you need an extremely flexible schedule because of young children or other time restraints, it will take you longer to find a job. If you can only get dial-up at your home and cannot get any form of high-speed Internet, it will take you quite a bit longer to find a job than it would someone with DSL at their home.

Read on to Part Two, where I cover why those exceptions aren't something you can lay at Career Step's door, and what my thoughts are on the other two schools (M-TEC and Andrews.)

This blog is part of a series on transcription. If you haven't read the other blogs in this series, make sure to check out the summary page for a listing of all transcription blogs.

Learn more about Hava Lyon

Hello, my name is Hava or Havs (depending on my mood and yours!) I am a freelance writer who writes for several blogs, both paid ones such as this one, and personal blogs.

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