The Marketplace and Dental Hygienist Training?

Answer 1

If you’re considering a career as a dental hygienist, you should know you’d be getting into one of the fastest-growing careers in today’s job market. Surveys rank dental hygiene in the top 30 occupations in terms of growth, and it is moving up. It’s a well-paid career as well, with the average hygienist making a salary of upwards of $70,000 per year. Most hygienists work for multiple dentists on an hourly rate ranging from around $30 to $40 per hour. Others work in community dental clinics and at university health centers. So, why is this field booming and how does its growth impact the kind of dental hygienist training you’ll need to enter the field?

If your grandparents are still with us, ask them what dental care was like, “back in the day.” They’ll tell you most people only went to a dentist when they absolutely had to – like for a toothache that just wouldn’t get better. Dentists back then principally pulled teeth and filled cavities. Orthodontics was in its infancy and a highly expensive endeavor available only to the wealthy. Employer provided dental insurance was a rarity. The concept of preventive dental care was barely getting out of the gate, spurred by fluoridation.

Today dental technology has exploded, and modern dentists have a multitude of new tools and techniques available to them. Preventive dental care is now at the forefront of dentistry and literally tens of thousands of people now have dental coverage. Consequently many dentists no longer have the time nor the desire to perform some of the more routine preventive dental procedures, like prophylaxis – teeth cleaning – or periodontal scaling. In ever increasing numbers, they are bringing in dental hygienists to perform these functions. In the near future, as more and more older dentists who prefer to reserve these procedures for themselves retire, the demand for dental hygienists will grow even more.

The implications of this trend for dental hygienist training may not be immediately obvious. It’s a “sellers market” for dental hygienist services – meaning the demand for hygienists is greater than the available supply. When the situation was reversed – when the demand for dental hygienists was low, the type of training a potential hygienist had was a bigger factor. Again, “back in the day” if you lived in Illinois and wanted to get into the field, you would get a huge competitive advantage if you got your dental hygienist training at the dental school of the University of Illinois at Chicago, or at Northwestern University. Today, you have a whole new set of options available to you. Many community colleges offer two year associate degree programs in dental hygiene which will prepare you to pass the licensing test and are more than sufficient to compete in today’s job market.