Optometry Technician or Assistant

Duties and Responsibilities:  An optometric technician is basically assistants of optometrists in which they provide vision correction to patients. As an optometry technician, their main duty is to help the optometrist with they eye examinations . Some duties of them are:

•    Assisting with patient eye care and examination
• Helping with the maintenance of the patient records.
• Handling technical duties which involves equipment and eyeglass preparation
• Do minor repairs of a broken or damaged glasses, eye contacts, etc. .
• Monitoring inventory with exam rooms or in the laboratory.  

However, their major responsibility is to care for their patients.

Salary: average of $22,260

Education:  In order to become an optometry technician, you must follow a formal education. First off, you must an associates degree in optician and complete you four-year university or college. Some courses you must take in order to become this technician are physiology, anatomy, algebra and computer science. Also, you must earn a paraoptometric certification to demonstrate your job skills. Finally, you also maintain a license on optometry.

Demand or Need for this profession: The job outlook for this employment is to expected to increase 24% between 2014 to 2024. Studies shows that it will keep increasing, therefore, the employment is pretty good.

Reflection: I don’t think I would like to be an assistant for an optometrist, because I would like to be bigger than  that like an optometrist and not an assistant. Overall, this job is not bad.

                                   Optometrist

Duties and Responsibilities:  An optometrist is an eye doctor in which they had earned the Doctor of Optometry degree. Some of their responsibilities include having decision-making skills able to articulate concisely the eye care instructions to their patients. They have a long list of duties on their daily life. Some of their duties consists of:

• Perform vision tests and analyze the results
• Diagnose sight problems or eye diseases
• Prescribe glasses, contact lenses, and medication
• Provide treatments such as a vision therapy
• Evaluate the patients for the presence of diseases such as diabetes.

Salary: $52,590-$184,530

Education: In order to become an Optometrist, you must meet the education requirements. To start off, they must need a Doctor of Optometry degree. They must apply for the O.D program and complete at least three years of post secondary education. This includes, biology, chemistry, English, and math. However, it might be better if you have a bachelor's degree before applying to this program. After that, they must take the Optometry Admission Test to apply for the O.D programs. These programs takes 4 years to complete. After concluding the O.D degree, few optometrists completes a one year residency program in order to have advanced clinical training.

Demand or Need for this profession: The employment is said to grow 24 percent from 2012-2022 in which is much faster than the average for all occupations. It is an increasing  number of the employment growth. Therefore, there shouldn’t be no need nor demand for now.

Reflection: I think I would like to be an optometrist, because I really like helping people with their issues and help them feel better.