I am pursuing a career as a dental lab technician. I have always been interested in the health professions, and I believe that my background and interests will make me an excellent fit in this profession. As with any industry, though, the dental technician field faces challenges today and will continue to do so in the future.
One of the biggest problems in the dental lab technician field is that there is a lack of needed education and certification programs. Because there are so many laboratories springing up offshore, taking dental lab tech jobs with them, there are fewer programs preparing people for that field in the United States (Blaes, 2015). Because of this, there has been a drop in quality of the work that laboratories are performing – and there are fewer opportunities available to potential technicians. The effect of moving those jobs overseas is that the work still being done in the United States is done on the cheap, because labs here cannot compete cost-wise with labs in other countries in many cases, and they end up hiring employees that are less skilled – and they end up doing shoddy work. That presents a real challenge for leadership, because they have workers with less skill that they have to train. That could potentially lead to the issue of “underprivileged quality ethics” (Textbook, page 25).
Going forward, a challenge that the profession will face over the next decade is the transition that dental offices make into investing in new technology. People in leadership have to decide whether they want to make those investments or not, again to ensure that their patients are as safe as possible from “underprivileged quality ethics” (Textbook, page 25). Dentists who are willing to invest in in-lab scanners, wax printers and milling machines allow the easier fabrication of milled implant frames that can fit patients with greater precision than the cast frames made with traditional methods (Pagliacelli 2015). The most innovative scanners today allow the dentist to send a scan to multiple facilities for completion of the substructures so that they don’t have to buy the milling machines themselves. Greater versatility on the technology end, though, means that dentists will continue to need versatile techs who can perform well in multiple environments.
References
Blaes, J. (2015). The crisis in dental laboratories. Dental Economics 96(4).
http://www.dentaleconomics.com/articles/print/volume-96/issue-4/features/the-crisis-in-dental-laboratories.html
Pagliacelli, S. (2015). The future of the dental lab industry: The lab industry ain’t never gonna be
the same. Dental Economics 105(7). http://www.dentaleconomics.com/articles/print/volume-105/issue-7/macroeconomics/the-future-of-the-dental-lab-industry-the-lab-industry-ain-t-never-gonna-be-the-same.html
