This month the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that 7.5 million Americans are unemployed, while at the same time 5.5 million jobs remain unfilled in America. This gap in labor exists because employers demand job-ready employees and millions of prospective employees are simply not able to bridge the skills gap without appropriate career education and training. One such career is dental assisting, where career education colleges and universities produced over half of the academic awards in 2015.
In honor of Dental Assistant Recognition week, CECU’s March SOS release focuses on the need for well-trained dental assistants. With the growing awareness of the importance of good oral health, the dental assistant profession has a much faster than average growth rate of 18% in the next 10 years. There will be a need for 58,600 trained dental assistants by 2024. Just in 2015, private sector career colleges and universities produced 14,944 academic awards in the dental assisting field, 64% of those produced across all sectors of higher education, according to CECU research supported by data from the U.S. Department of Education IPEDS database and BLS. From 2011-2015, a total of 88,492 academic awards in the dental assisting field came from career colleges and universities.
Dental assistants perform important tasks in a dentist’s office, and will increasingly be needed to assist dentists in managing a higher number of patients. From patient care, to cleaning treatment areas and tools, to clerical tasks such as scheduling appointments and working on billing, dental assistants help dentist’s offices function smoothly and allow them to help a higher volume of patients. Their median pay in 2015 was $35,980, right around the median income for all occupations, and higher than the median pay for other healthcare support occupations. This, combined with the high expected growth of the profession, presents a promising outlook for those studying to become dental assistants.