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What To Learn

High School

What high school courses should you take if you're interested in this career? Get your answers from the Arts, Audio-Video Technology and Communications cluster Audio and Video Technology and Film pathway.

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Closed captioners must be fast and accurate typists.

Supervisor Chris Leininger says 40 words per minute is an acceptable keyboarding speed. But you'll also need strong computer skills.

"Words per minute matter, but you get really good at hitting the keys to make it fast-forward, stop and rewind. Being really familiar with computers is tremendously helpful."

A degree in English, linguistics or secretarial studies is a big plus in this field, as well as good editing skills.

"In spite of the fact that captioning is the most difficult work in the reporting-related professions, there's no certification," says Kevin Daniel. He works for a captioning company in the San Francisco area. "Training has been almost exclusively done on the job."

General knowledge comes in very helpful in this kind of work. "For what we do -- offline -- the most important thing is to have really broad experience. We hire liberal arts majors here because we never know what we're going to come across.

"Today," says Leininger, "someone was working on a show about canoeing. [The voice said] 'If you watch inexperienced canoeists, you'll see grommets crashing up on the shore all the time.'" It turned out the closed captioner working on the item didn't know how the word fit into the context of canoeing.

"We had 'grommets,' and we were looking for anything else," says Leininger. They asked around the office, and sure enough, someone was able to solve the mystery. "Well, it's 'Grumman,' a brand of canoe," he says, chuckling. "The broader the range of experience you have, the easier it is to pick out this stuff."

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    ndcrn@nd.gov | (701) 328-9733

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