Wednesday, March 7, 2012

What Factors Affect Your Salary

By Bob Beckman


Being in the court reporting profession gives you quite a good opportunity to make it in life. Given ample time and effort you would be able to make expenses as you wish, in short it is a good paying job. The profession provides a lot of options that could suite the different lifestyle and personalities present in today's world. So how much does a court reporter actually make in a year? Well according to the data from Salary Wizard on 2009, the basic or median salary of a court reporter in the United States falls around $49,421. For anyone out there who is considering getting into this profession or already looking forward to get a job after attending school for this profession, here are the factors that would affect the court reporting salary you may receive.

Location Where you live has a great weight on the compensation that you may get from being a court report, well this really applies to almost every job in the world. For freelance and stenographers that work on court the pay structure is mostly dependent on the state to state cost of living. Also it is important to note that each state has different licensing requirements, from having to pass difficult hands-on and written exams to just simply becoming a notary public(see top criminal justice colleges).

Realtime Capable Due to improving computer steno theories and equipment, most of today's graduates are technically, "realtime ready". Although having a good theory and writing would be enough, having realtime capabilities would surely give you a greater boost in achieving a higher salary in this career. We live in a high-tech and fast pace world after all, so adapting to these high tech methods would really be a great help in any career.

Being Official Reporters Official reporters are often paid with a decent salary, and are given benefits. They are actually being paid by per page transcribed, although not every word you take down in court is transcribed. So if you can find a way to get more pages transcribed then you can definitely have greater chance of increasing your salary.

Start your own Agency If you are someone who likes to aim big, and has the capability and the drive to do so then this could be great for you. If you are good in dealing with people and have great PR skills, then this would definitely be a better chance for you rather than sitting behind a steno machine day after day. The risks would be greater though, because this would really not be stable at first, but well no guts no glory. After all the greater the risks the greater the rewards, that is how real business works. You can find the attorney clients and hire court reporters on an independent contractual basis. You would also need some administrative staffs to prepare and mail the paper transcripts, handle billing, and answer phones, etc. There would be no limit to what you can earn if you pursue this path.

So this is basically some of the things and factors that you could do that would greatly influence how much your court reporting salary could increase. Try to take these things into consideration, try researching more on ways that may aide you in achieving greater success in this profession.



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