How useful is a BASIC medical terminology course

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m gonna ramble, bear with me.

So here’s the skinny - the job I’ve got right now may or may not continue on after Christmas. It may or may not lead to a permanent job.

I’d like it to, but I’ve got to be realistic here and there’s a high chance it may not do. Especially due to the head dicks in Sydney deciding that the best way to pull the business out of a slump is to start rolling heads. But anyway.

My skills mostly lie in call centre customer service. I will chew my own leg off before I head in that direction again. I’d prefer to stay where I am, which is office admin style work. But I’ve only been doing this sort of work for a few months, and so most employers overlook me in favour of someone who’s been doing it for longer. I need a marketable skill.

Enter medical typing/transcription. I’ve seen a few jobs for it going in the local job website of late. But I don’t have those skills.

How useful is a basic medical terminology course going to be for that sort of work? Is it likely to be sufficient? Or is it going to be more likely that I’d have to take an advanced course to get to the level where it’s going to be useful for attracting an employer?

2

My letters are typed by secretaries in the department. Seeing the standard of their work, I’m sure all you need would be a written sheet of commonly used terms and abbreviations. I don’t think a course would be necessary.

3

TAFE NSW run a 60 hour course that is the accepted qualification in a few fields.

4

Unfortunately all medical typist jobs over here have the prerequisite of experience in the field. I can’t get experience without the job, and I can’t get the job without experience. My only hope for getting a foot in the door does seem to be a certification of some kind.

Re: TAFE NSW. They’re one of the providers I’ve looked at for the course. They’re not the only one, though. My biggest concern with TAFE is that they want you to have completed the HSC or equivalent (SACE over here), and I never did so I’d have to look into how stringently they actually enforce (or check up on) that one.