The National Court Reporters Association (NCRA) represents professionals in the stenography, captioner, court reporting and legal videographer fields. The organization announced a new certification, which was recently approved by its Board of Directors. The Certified Realtime Captioner or CRC certification is a merging of the CBC (Certified Broadcast Captioner) and CCP (Certified CART Provider) into a single certification.
The new certification comes as the need for captioning training continues to rise. The trend has been ongoing for years and the NCRA has developed the new certification as well as a workshop to meet the increasing demand for caption trained professionals. NCRA members will now have the ability and the tools to add captioning to their list of skills.
This new program has been constructed to work with the TRAIN program to increase realtime productivity. The end goal is twofold: produce more certified professionals and give them the means to be successful.
The first workshop was rolled out at the NCRA’s 2015 Convention and Expo which was held in New York in July and was a huge success. Current CCP’s and CBC’s will be converted into the new CRC certification status as of January 1, 2016.
CRC certification candidates will be obligated to complete a captioning workshop and pass a realtime dictation skills exam. The skills exam can be taken before the workshop or vice versa.
The NCRA feels that this new certification increases the value of the certified individual and will be more easily recognized throughout the industry, which in turn will increase the demand for these services.
NCRA Board Member Heidi Thomas summed up the change by saying, “As the captioning industry has changed and expanded, NCRA members will benefit by developing and providing certifications and tests necessary to reflect sufficient writing ability and broad training.”