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Top 6 Jobs for People with Typing Skills

If you're an excellent typist, there are several ways you can make money with your skills. Some careers even allow you to work from home. If you're looking for a way to use your skills to earn cash, here are the top six jobs for people with typing skills. 

  1. Transcriptionist
    The term "transcriptionist" covers a wide field of employment opportunities. You can be a transcriptionist in medicine, law, finance, and more. Your job as a transcriptionist is to type what someone is saying or has said in a recording. For example, as a medical transcriptionist, it’s your job to type what a doctor said regarding a case and the conditions involved. 

    Being a transcriptionist is the kind of job you can do from home. Some medical transcriptionist companies allow you to work from home using tapes that are mailed to you. Another way you can work from home is by working through a website like AccuTran Global. This company hires transcriptionists to work on projects from various contractors around the United States.
  2. Data Entry Clerk
    Being a Data Entry Clerk may not sound like one of the most appealing jobs on the list, but it’s an important entry level position for many companies. Without data entry clerks, much of the information from a company can be lost. The data can include accounting reports, sales, client names, and more.

    As a data entry clerk, you need excellent typing skills. You need to be able to work quickly and accurately because a mistake can have grave consequences. You also need to give great attention to detail. Some jobs require customer service skills as well.

    If you’re looking to do data entry from home, you can find plenty of jobs through Freelancer. This website allows you to find data entry jobs that pay different amounts, whether it’s per hour or per job. At Freelancer, you can read about the employment opportunity and decide whether it’s right for you.
  3. Subtitle and Closed Captioning Typist
    While you may not think about it, some people need subtitles or closed captions to watch movies, videos, or television shows. Some may believe that a computer completes this job, but in reality, it’s a job for people. This job requires you to have excellent typing skills, as you need to type quickly and without errors. Mistakes can cause confusion for those who are deaf or hearing impaired.

    If you’re interested in subtitling or captioning videos, you can also do this from home. Rev allows you to caption television shows, educational videos, and much more through freelance positions. The website states that the average monthly earnings are around $240, but you can earn as much as $1,500. 
  4. Personal Assistant/Administrative Assistant 
    Personal assistant, administrative assistant, secretary—whatever you want to call the job, typing skills are a necessity. While you need to have basic office skills and know how to work with Microsoft Office, most employers want you to have proficient typing skills, too. While the bar is set low, usually around 50–60 words per minute, some companies may want you to type as fast as 80 words per minute. Some legal secretaries need to type a minimum of 90 words per minute.
  5. Court Reporter
    Court reporters have to type very quickly without missing a beat. Typing skills are essential, as the average speed of a court reporter is around 225 words per minute (WPM). This WPM isn't achieved with a regular QWERTY keyboard. Court reporters and stenographers use what’s called a "stenograph," which uses sounds, vowel combinations, and other such keys to record what’s said in the courtroom word-for-word. It’s not a conventional keyboard, but typing skills are required.
  6. Freelance Writing
    Mechanical Turk, or Mturk, isn’t so much a job as it is a website where you can earn a living based on your level of typing skills. Owned by Amazon, Mturk is where you can make money by doing various jobs. 

    There are a few requirements when you sign up. One, you have to create an account and link Amazon Payments to this account. This process might sound fishy, but as someone who has personally done it, it’s perfectly safe. From there, you can spend your money directly on items listed on Amazon, or it can be deposited into a verified bank account.

    Jobs on the website vary vastly, and typing skills are necessary for most of them. While adding subtitles/captions to videos and transcribing are some of the top requests, you can also use your typing skills in other ways. Some jobs include reviewing websites, typing the words from images, copying receipts to text, and other jobs that pay various amounts. You receive your money based on when the requester has a chance to review it. This time usually ranges from a few days to a couple of weeks. The amount of money you earn is entirely up to you. Some jobs pay hundreds of dollars per completed request.

    Similar to Mechanical Turk, XPlace allows you to accept freelance jobs based on your typing skills. It doesn’t charge a commission from freelancers to complete projects, and there are a variety of jobs from all over the world. Depending on your skill, you may be able to make thousands of dollars on long-term projects through transcription, typing, and data entry. Each job has a different payout, and each entry has another skill attached to it like writing, coding, or translating. Check out the hundreds of jobs available through XPlace, and you may find yourself making quite a bit of money.
Last Updated: October 27, 2016