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Studies conducted by the NCRA reflect the shortage of realtime court reporters and captioners and the need to train more of them … more quickly. The demand for court reporters, broadcast captioners, and CART providers is growing exponentially. However, those studies also reflect the need to eliminate the teaching of old-fashioned, complex, theories taught in traditional schools. The Future Group report acknowledged a “brutal” fact, stating the NCRA has been supporting a model of education that has never experienced a significant success rate and further suggested the NCRA should take an objective look at the way traditional schools have been teaching, make radical changes, consider new approaches, as well as alternative approaches to training such as online or home study training. With the need ever increasing for people to fill these positions, the number of traditional schools has decreased by almost half since about 1995.
Ironically, the demand is growing exponentially for Real-Time Court Reporters and Broadcast Closed Captioners, and according to the Department of Labor will continue to do so through 2016.
Because of these findings, new methods of realtime court reporting and broadcast closed captioning training have been developed and become very successful, such as online programs and self-paced home study programs.
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broadcast closed captioners, and CART providers is projected to grow 25 percent, much faster than the average for all occupations between 2006 and 2016.
These careers, realtime court reporting, broadcast (closed) captioning, and CART providing, are taught in self-paced home study programs as well as traditional court reporting schools.
Job prospects are expected to be excellent as job openings continue to outnumber job seekers. Demand for real-time court reporting, broadcast (closed) captioning, and CART providing will ensure employment growth.
Licensure and certification requirements vary by state. Approximately half of the states require students to pass a certification examination before they can work as a court reporter. These examinations are either conducted by the state or by the National Court Reporters Association. Some broadcast closed captioning companies prefer the captioner to have passed a certification examination while others do not require the student to have passed a certification examination. All broadcast closed captioning companies will evaluate a sample of the student’s real-time writing to determine if they meet the standards to employ them.
In addition, more real-time court reporters will be needed to caption outside of legal proceedings as federal legislation mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act mandates that all television programming be captioned for the deaf and hard of hearing. All new Spanish-language programming likewise must be captioned by 2010. Additionally, the Americans with Disabilities Act provides deaf and hard-of-hearing students in colleges and universities the right to request access to real-time reporters (known as CART - Communication Access Realtime Translation - providers) who provide real-time translation in their classes. These factors are expected to continue to increase the demand for real-time court reporters who provide CART services.
The above statistics, forecasts, and projections were taken from the U.S. Department of Labor and may be accessed at their website
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