High Paying Career W/ Short Term Training: Court Reporter

Check Out the Many Interesting High Tech Paths that a Court Reporter Can Take

The court reporter is the person endowed with the awesome responsibility of preserving the legal record. That person has to keep a verbatim account of legal proceedings. We traditionally think of the court reporter as the person who sits in a courtroom silently typing away on their machine.

The machine that the court reporter uses isn't actually a typewriter it is a stenotype machine. The stenotype machine differs from a typewriter in that it allows the user to type or "write" entire words at a time as opposed to typing a string of letters to make words. Whereas the typical typist can type about 40 words per minute a court reporter can average about 230 words per minute. There are two additional accepted ways of capturing courtroom proceedings, one is electronic recording and the other is voice writing. Voice writing has gained in popularity because of the improving accuracy of speech recognition equipment; the machine that voice writers use is called a stenomask.

An interesting way in which court reporters can use their skill is through Broadcast Captioning. Think about all of the television shows that offer closed captioning (cc) options for the hearing impaired. Even more interesting is Real Time Broadcast Captioning...imagine it, you could be the one to bring every detail of a live event to the hearing impaired community as it happens (real time).

Now is a really good time to get into this field because there is a shortage of qualified professionals. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics the average Court Reporter earns between $33,000 and $61,000 per year. The highest paid Court Reporter earns in excess of $76,000 per year. Their annual salary is dependent upon their length of time in the field for salaried workers and work they choose to do on the side or wholly upon the amount freelance work the self employed professional chooses to take upon themselves...they usually have a plentifull amount of work to complete if they so desire.