A blog for the work-at-home professional by a work-at-home professional.

HOW ARE YOUR TYPING SKILLS?

Whether you’re a work-at-home employee or a self-employed pro-blogger, your typing skills are some of the best assets that you can have as an online professional. I reiterate: Your typing speed and accuracy are commensurate to your productivity. The faster you type, the more work you can do in a day and the more money you earn.

An online professional needs to have a typing speed of at least 40 wpm (words per minute). If you would like to be a transcriptionist like me, you would need to have a typing speed of 60 wpm. Of course, your accuracy should be no less than 100%.

Are your typing skills below par? Don’t despair. There are hundreds of free typing tutors on the Internet available for download or for use online.

Here’s the link to a website that provides a list of typing tutors that are either freeware or shareware:

http://typingsoft.com/all_typing_tutors.htm


Just in case you’re wondering: When I started working, my peak typing speed was just 35 wpm, just enough to get me hired by the call center that I used to work for. By the way, I used the Biblical typing technique (“Seek and you shall find”). When I started out, the customers I talked with often grew impatient because I could not pull up the information that they were asking for right away, and that was because I wasn’t typing fast enough. As a result, my AHT scores (average handling time) went through the roof, which wasn’t a good thing, because they were supposed to be low (A high AHT score means the call center agent always keeps the customers waiting).

I then decided to do something about it. I went to the Sense-lang.org website and used the online free touch-typing tutor. This program, by the way, requires you to paste some text in a text box and then you would have to type the text. What I did was I copied and pasted the text from the emails that I needed to read, and I did this in between calls. I read my emails while I typed them. Talk about multi-tasking!

In a couple of months, my typing speed improved considerably and so did my stats (By “stats,” I mean my evaluation scores). And there were less and less impatient costumers. After a year, I decided to switch to another job. From a call center agent, I became a home-based transcriptionist. I wouldn’t be qualified for this job if my typing speed were less than 60 wpm. Needless to say, I acquired that speed — thanks to that typing tutor at Sense-lang.org.

I just visited the Sense-lang.org website after a long, long time. They now have a typing tutor for the Dvorak keyboard layout. They even have a tutor for the numeric keypad. They also have typing games to which makes learning how to type even more fun.

You can go to Sense-lang.org to check out the typing tutor.

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