Stenography Seminar Workshop

40-hours

Schedule:    Every Saturday

                   (10 Saturdays - 4 hours/session)

 

To be a stenographer, you have to type or write quickly and be skilled at shorthand. The act of taking dictation is stenography.  Some say it’s outdated and irrelevant, and with our increasing usage of sophisticated technology, but if you ask any journalist, reporter or personal assistants today how valuable shorthand is, they will more than likely tell you how vital the skill is to be able to carry out their day-to-day job.

Aside from being an essential addition to any aspiring journalist’s CV (you are unlikely to even get to the interview stage unless you have shorthand on your CV), the benefits of this skill are huge.  Transcribing notes from shorthand is a lot faster than from a recording device. Furthermore, there’s always that dreaded chance of a technical fault with voice recorders, words appearing muffled or undecipherable, jeopardizing the quality and accuracy of the story. Precision is vital for any respectable reporter, and if your story is inaccurate or a muffled recording of a vital piece of information in the tape, you could end up in trouble with interviewees, readers, and even the law.

Secretaries are paid to do the organizing and recording – and the recording of information, and then transmitting it accurately from one place to another is one of the prime responsibilities of a personal assistant or secretary. Shorthand should be the first step in this process, and while many bosses rarely “dictate” letters to their secretaries, one could argue that if they still did, their productivity would be greatly enhanced because it would save them, the bosses, hours at their computers, typing their documentation. 

Secretaries with shorthand skills also have the advantage of being able to do accurate minute taking, recording to-dos and instructions from their boss, take telephone messages accurately, more importantly, know more about the business.

For criminologists, when interviewing someone involved in a distressing case, shorthand is again the preferred method. Of course, no one would want a recording device placed in front of the interviewee when they are in a sensitive situation, and here is the benefit of shorthand; it’s unobtrusive, discreet, and only those trained in shorthand will be able to decipher it.

Samson College of Science and Technology offers a 40-hour seminar-workshop to have students develop their shorthand skills rapidly, efficiently, and accurately using our tried and proven methods for teaching shorthand.