Medical transcription. Judging by your post, you can spell and have good grammar. MTs work at home. The pay is not good starting out but by the end of the first year an average MT makes about $18 to $20 an hour. You are paid on production, can work at home, and there are tons of jobs. Training is relatively fast at about 4 months to a year depending where you go to school. It’s not super hard to learn but is a developed skill. At times, you’ll want to throw your computer out the window; However, once you learn it, it’s not that difficult. You can train at home online in your spare time w/ a self-paced online school. Choose one that has an internship program to help you get started working. Also, you said you have a family, if you could train with your wife and both do it, all the better. You would save on childcare/daycare expenses, be together more, and if you didn’t want to work for someone else, you could start your own MT Services. MT Service owners make VERY good money- $100,000 plus for a small to average sized service and more if you grow it large.

You next best bet would be to learn medical coding/billing. However, that is mostly done in the doctors office or hospital. For a hospital job, you would need a high level coding credential and a longer training period. For a doctor’s office job, the pay would start around $12 w/o a credential and more w/ one.

For the best ratio of school: pay I think nursing. You can do that in as little as a year and the starting salary is great

Physical Therapist is pretty easy and doesn’t require much schooling. The schedule is also quite flexible, so you can have more time w/ your family.

CAs have like a 2 week course that most places pay for

I did a nursing assistant class at a technical collage that only took about a month to complete and I started out at $11.00/hour. I’m a guy and I wasn’t afraid to go into the field….there’s alot of cute women at hospitals!