Users in this career have rated it a 1.7 in terms of their own personal satisfaction with the career. This figure represents an average taken from the responses of 429 MyPlan.com users during registration.
Users were asked to rate their happiness in their current occupation as being either "Very Happy" (4), "Happy" (3), "Mixed / Neutral" (2), "Not Happy" (1), or "Miserable" (0).
Users in this Career Group
There are 955 users in this career group. They represent 23 different countries. You can see the list of users in this career group by clicking on one of the links below. You can also join this career group simply by selecting your current status and clicking "Add Me."
There
are 4 reviews of this career. The most recent 3 reviews are listed below. You can see more reviews by clicking on "Read all reviews..." at the bottom of this page.
Pure data entry for eight hours a day can be very boring but if it's part of an administrative type position then it can lend an air of normalcy to a job that can be different from day to day. When I was doing data entry eight hours a day I was entering medical claims from health care providers for an HMO Insurance company and because of the nature of the work we we're not on the phone at all unless we made the call ourself so we were able to listen to music on a headset all day if we chose, which was very nice if you like music or audio books. There were production standards but most were attainable. Also, because we were part of the UAW union the pay and benefits were outstanding. However, as a rule data entry is not a top paying job unless you are doing a specific type like medical coding or billing.
My advice for people considering this career is to stay away unless you enjoy carpal tunnel syndrome. The pay is not good, and it will continue to be diminished as handwriting and text recognition software becomes more sophisticated. My job pays better than most in my field but offers few advancement opportunities thanks to a strong union presence in my facility (USPS). Sadly, I would have taken this job years ago due to the fact that other jobs I held before it were even worse and paid less. The only pros I can list here is that the work is fairly consistent and that our facility hasn't been downsized (yet). The cons? My co-workers are often fat and carriers of more diseases than civilized people should have, advancement is not principally based on performance (it is more based on an entry exam and seniority), pay raises are few and far between, and hours can be brutal during certain times of the year (especially Christmas). At least you get to learn lots of boring facts about the mail routing system in the United States that would never be even remotely useful for most of its citizens. Eh, it's a living.
I would recommend the data entry career to anybody that loves typing, and that can type fast with good accuracy. Data entry is entering information into a computer data base either off of paper forms or from verbal responses. The thing that I like the most about my data entry position is that I work off of paper forms. So I can listen to my MP3 player all day, or listen to books on c.d. My employer is good because there is a flexible shirt schedule. So I can go in at 7 in the morning and be done when my kids are getting out of school. The one thing that I encourage people to consider with a data entry career is that if you don't have an ergonomically correct workstation data entry people can have bad wrists within a couple of years.
