Since the creation of the shorthand machine in the early 1900's, students have been trained to enter the field of court reporting where they have mastered shorthand at speeds up to 300 words per minute. Most of the jobs for these early students were as reporters assigned to a judge in a courthouse. Through the next several years, court reporting schools began to emerge and training was predominately done to fulfill the need for freelance and court positions. Then in the 1960's and 1970's, court reporting programs began to offer machine shorthand classes for students who wanted to use the shorthand machine as their means of writing shorthand for the office environment. In fact, during that period of time many high schools were teaching machine shorthand in lieu of manual shorthand. Some of these students went on to court reporting school, but many of them found employment in offices. They were hired to take dictation from their bosses and to transcribe from their shorthand notes the office correspondence.

In the 1980's and early 1990's, court reporting students were learning to use CAT (Computer-Aided Transcription) software for producing their transcripts. Court reporting students were becoming extremely computer literate. Realtime CAT software, where the judge and attorneys could read the transcript as it was being written, and captioning software were coming into the marketplace and the court reporting students were finding they had more job opportunities being offered to them in the field of educational reporting, convention reporting and captioning work.