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Dental Assisting - anyone? - Curious

Posted: Aug 01, 2011

I posted about different career choices and a lot of people responded about nursing and radiology tech, but no one responded regarding dental assisting as an option. I used to make 20-25 an hour doing MT. Now I am down to 16 an hour and sitting around waiting for work, etc. I am just looking for a comfortable job that pays about the same as I was making as an MT. I have researched dental assisting and found that it is a good career. Dentists are utilizing DA's more often and they are making up to 20 an hour, sometimes more if you are a registered dental assistant.

The schools that I am finding are pretty short, 20 weeks, and include the instruction hours to qualify to sit for the x-ray exam.

Has anyone ever thought about dental assisting or have worked in this field?

dental assisting - INMT

[ In Reply To ..]
I worked in this field for 25 years.. At the height of my career I made 159.00 per day working about 260 days per year. It's great work if you like working with your boss literally under your knees all days. Registered dental assistant does not carry much extra weight in my opinion, you have to obviously take the test which is very difficult now.. used to be written only and now I understand it is written and hands on with TONS of skills needed in orthodontia. I can promise you that the school you attend will never prepare you for working with the doctor or doing real assisting. My school even taught us know to fill a filling with material, never in my career did a doctor even consider letting us do that. It fun work but the pay is not gonna be what the school says for a long while after you graduate. Best advice I can say is find a GOOD dentist willing to do on the job training and do not waste cash on a school.. learn a lot more and a lot faster. Email if you want any further info

I had thought about doing this earlier in the year only to find out that (sm) - anon

[ In Reply To ..]
there are dental assistants apparently coming out of the woodwork in my area. I live in a relatively "smaller" town with a local community college that offers dental assisting. The program that they offer, if I remember correctly, is an 18 month course with a long waiting list just to get in and they give preference to the local high schools. In other words, if I had been next in line for admission and one of the high school students, regardless of what age or grade they are in, decided that they wanted to enter this program, I would have been bumped. Besides that I actually just learned from my dentist office last month that over half of the class that graduated in March is unable to find jobs because there are just so many people in dental assisting now. For a "smaller" town we actually have a great number of dentists here, I live about 40 minutes from Atlanta, so I thought that there would be lots of job opportunities in this field. I was really surprised after doing some research.

My advice would be to make sure that you do the research for your area. Good luck to you!!!

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