At a time when large numbers of people are taking a critical look at their careers after more than a year of massive economic upheaval during the covid-19 pandemic, Community College of Allegheny County professor Mary Beth Johnson has a suggestion: court reporting.

“I’ve taught court reporting for 45 years, and we’ve always had 100% placement of the students who graduate,” said Johnson, CCAC’s business technology department chair. “Now what’s happening is, because I’m on my second generation of teaching reporters, those folks in the first generation are retiring.”

According to a 2014 study commissioned by the National Court Reporters Association, 70% of stenographers in the U.S. were 46 years or older in 2013, and the number of new stenographers entering the market has not kept pace with the number of retirees.

And, while Pennsylvania specifically is not experiencing a shortage of qualified stenographers, according to the NCRA, litigation-heavy states like Texas and California are.

Johnson said she can place every student she has.

“If we graduate 10 court reporters, we have jobs for at least those 10,” she said. “And those businesses are calling, asking when they’re going to graduate and get started.”

CCAC court reporting students can earn certification or a two-year associate’s degree, and salaries start in the $40,000 range, Johnson said.

“One of our graduates provides captions for the electronic billboard at PNC Park,” she said. “There is the Computer Assisted Realtime Translation, or CART, system, where someone can attend college and a court reporter will write down the class lectures and notes for you. Our graduates attend college at places like Carnegie Mellon, and they transcribe notes so that deaf students can use them in real-time.”

Krista Gush, 27, of Monessen works as a court reporter in the Westmoreland County Courthouse, and said it has been a dependable way to build a career.

“One thing in my life I’m never worried about is work,” she said. “There’s plenty of it.”

The courthouse had a shortage of court reporters until recent years, she said.

“You have 11 judges here, and maybe eight have their own court reporter. But the other three need one, and they had no choice but to use recording software,” Gush said.

And while recording software can help, it can’t compare to a human being who is not only entering court proceedings and depositions into a stenography machine, but also making their own recordings.

“I think society still has this image of court reporters using paper to type our steno on,” Gush said. “But we use advanced technology and we use it to our advantage. There are always continuing education classes, and we need to get so many of those credits per year.”

The freelance sector

Before her job at the courthouse, Gush worked as a stenographer for court depositions and performed freelance work around Pittsburgh.

“That’s great if you’re going through major life changes, or you’re expecting a family, because you can work as much or as little as you want,” she said.

That’s the way Dutcheen Cameron, 60, of Penn Township, has approached her stenography work for the past three decades. After working for 11 years at the Westmoreland courthouse, Cameron had her second child and decided to shift to the world of freelance stenography.

“I have some of my own clients, and I work for some of the national firms,” Cameron said. “I absolutely love freelancing. I do a lot of real-time transcribing for deposition work.”

Where Gush was looking for a full-time job and the benefits that come with it, Cameron had benefits through her husband’s job, and enjoys the freedom that comes with part-time work.

“Freelancing can be feast or famine, so if you’re a single person, that’s much more difficult,” she said.

Creating the captions

In addition to court reporting, those who undergo CCAC’s program can also find themselves working in the closed-caption industry, which got a massive boost in the past 16 months thanks to millions more people meeting through services like Zoom.

“We’ve had a tremendous boom in our industry because of covid,” said Chuck Karlovits, chief captioning officer at VITAC, the Canonsburg company where the nation’s closed-captioning industry began about 35 years ago. “So many people have become aware of providing captions for teleconferences. And so we’re looking for people who can do the job, and we provide training and teach them everything they need to know to be a successful captioner.”

NCRA President Christine Phipps, who is also the owner of Phipps Reporting in Florida, said the expansion of remote technology has created a boom in the stenography industry.

“We’ve offered remote reporting for the past 10 years, but prior to the pandemic, we’d maybe have a couple hundred jobs a year that were remote,” Phipps said. “Now, almost our entire calendar is remote work. That technology really allows for a wonderful opportunity. You have people who live in a small town in Iowa, and they can now cover work in other areas that a more of a hot-bed for litigation.”

VITAC trains prospective employees via an eight-week training course, and careers there start around $35,000 or $17 per hour.“It all depends on how many hours you do and how you improve your skill set,” Karlovits said.

Today, VITAC is the largest North American company providing live captioning, with more than 550,000 hours of live captioning annually.

Karyn Valeriano, 53, of Robinson, switched from court reporting to live captioning about a decade ago, and was recently recognized by the National Court Reporters Association for earning Certified Realtime Captioner certification and for the quality of her work in captioning things like the Olympic Games, ABC’s “Good Morning America,” championship football games and the NBA Finals.

Since the pandemic began, Valeriano said she’s captioned “everything from church services to a meeting of Native American tribal leaders to TED Talks.”

With the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990, all broadcaster, cable companies and satellite providers must, by law, provide closed captioning for consumers.

“Each network has a format I must follow regarding where captions appear on the screen, if I need to identify the speaker, and other special instructions,” she said.

‘You have to practice every single day’

Johnson said she is upfront with her students about the realities of stenography work.

“Court reporting is hard. I say that to everyone,” she said. “You have to practice every day because it’s a skill subset. And for a CCAC student who maybe has a child or a part-time job, that’s hard. But they can do it knowing that someday, they can earn a full-time wage and support their family.”

Cameron said the industry has come a long way from the days when she was still using a typewriter.

“Now it’s a computer-aided transcription program,” she said. “Some people who had been around a while decided to quit rather than keep up, but I embraced the technology of computers, the internet and real-time work.”

Valeriano said the relatively unknown and unique job “has afforded me a long and rewarding career. Jobs in this industry are in demand if you’re prepared to work hard and continuously improve your craft.”

Phipps said there is not enough publicity about the profession.

“I have court reporters who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing court reporting,” she said. “But people don’t know about it. The opportunities just abound.”

Karlovits agreed.

“It’s a really great job,” he said. “You have an opportunity to help the hearing-impaired and touch millions of people’s lives every day. And it’s always changing day-to-day.”

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