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Most people have never heard of this
Canadian data · Ontario, Canada
You sit in on a two-hour hearing and produce a verbatim record at 220 words a minute on a stenotype. Afternoon is live captioning a lecture from your kitchen. Everyone in the room is talking about something enormous and your job is to disappear.
Specialised program plus a speed certification
A certificate — it says you studied. Employers want it; the law doesn't require it.
$12,000 – $20,000, 2–3 years to speed
You do not earn while you learn.
$55k – $110ka year, Ontario
The low number is what you should plan on for the first years.
Openings a year
90 openings a year · Holding steady
Courts shrank, live captioning grew, and the two roughly cancel out.
Who else is asking
about 2 people per opening
Almost none — because most people wash out of the training, not the hiring.
Whether a machine takes it
exposure: high
Machine transcription is genuinely good now. It is not certifiable, and the last five per cent is where the money sits.
Where the work is
everywhere
Remote captioning means you can live anywhere with a decent connection.
Who actually does it
who's in the room
Older on average than anything else here, and increasingly freelance.
How soon you earn
About 22 months before you earn
Counted from the day you decide, not the day you start.
Hard in a different way: about 1 in 10 who start reach certification speed.
That's a real wall, and it's better to know now. People do get through — usually the ones who applied twice and spent the gap year in a related job. The near neighbours below have no such wall.
The plateau at 180 words a minute breaks most people. It is a physical skill, not a study skill.
Broadcast captioning, CART for universities, freelance depositions, legal tech.
Try a free online steno tutorial for twenty minutes. You'll know fast whether the wiring appeals.
14 paths cover this suite so far. We never rank them and we never name a single best one for you.