Expand your Optical Toolbox
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If the solar powered protestors are absorbing additional UV as they block spots on the sidewalks or public spaces in the financial district of your town, you have several new opportunities. You can view a global map on YouTube where “Occupy Wall Street” events have begun occurring since August. There are as many agendas as individuals, but not all these folks are out of work. Many come and go around their employment schedules.
If you’re an ECP, you can suggest the need for additional sunwear protection. With plenty of time for discussions of a myriad of topics, it’s a quick glance between vision benefits coverage to jobs, before the weather changes, the temperature drops and the masses thin out to the persistent hardcore. It’s also a good time to update your resume, assess your marketability and reflect on your career options, expectations and possible changes driven by external economic forces or internal desires. In tandem with human resources’ challenges are the relentless developments in optically-related technologies, four of which will be spotlighted further down.
When you were a little kid and someone asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, I bet you didn’t answer “Optician.” There’s a little more response variety since parents have been participating in the “Take your Dad/Mom to School Day,” but the common answers were and usually still are Fireman, Policeman, Pilot, Teacher and Doctor. For the focus of this essay, I suggest that the degree and caliber of specialty expertise required in Ophthalmology and Optometry be acknowledged with respect and gratitude at this time. Then for the next few paragraphs I’d like to confine the focus to the “Third O”, Opticianry, which comes with a “Third Eye.” You have the power to raise the lid to reveal the Fields of Vision that are the components of the space before you.
Think about how YOU got into the business of optics. I worked for a total of five years for a sole proprietor career optician who was a bombardier in WWII; if he could do the math to hit the target, he could calculate prescriptions and measurements. Another major retail chain optical manager painted prosthetic eyes; she used to make up little stories about what the recipient’s life might be like: “This guy stayed up a little too late last night.”
I went into a price house to buy some Barnes-Hind wetting solution for my hard contact lenses; one of the opticians said the other employee was leaving and invited me to apply. You have to use your own product to be successful. Consider discharged vets with their training in sighting & firing using rifle scopes, infrared goggles, satellite surveillance, computer operations.
(See Iris/Retina Global Security Identification below). It’s all about reinventing yourself with “Transferable Skills.”
The depth, breadth and diversity of Opticianry rivals the skills required to run any small business. If you’re feeling insecure about the possibility of being let go, which bulleted activities in the list below could you add to your arsenal to make you more valuable where you are or use to gain entry into another position with a change in primary duties? Which of the following is your current area of expertise, of newer interest to you, or would you prefer to stop doing altogether? If you’re the employer, which are most important for a position you’re attempting to fill?
· Reception
· Accessories: cases, solutions, cleaners, neck chains
· Appointment Setting
· Sales
· Marketing
· Frame Styling
· Consulting
· Customer Service
· Problem solving
· Psychology
· Lens surfacing
· Eyewear fabrication
· Dispensing, repairs and adjustments
· Contact lens fitting
· Quality Assurance
· Quality Control
· Lens verification/final inspections
· Government guideline adherence
· Inventory/supply chain management
· Purchasing
· Accounting
· Computer data entry - patient records/job orders
· Insurance claims processing
· Correspondence/reports
· Manufacturer’s Rep
· Human Resources
· Low vision aids – magnifiers
· Website maintenance
Secondarily: Knowledge about manufacture and use of cameras, binoculars, telescopes, microscopes all provide foundations of understanding to build on. More and more optical courses are being added to college curriculums; ABO Certification and obtaining your annual Continuing Education Credits is essential for a career in Opticianry, especially in those states requiring licensing. Formal Education and/or experience in any of the bulleted items above can qualify you for entry into optical and related businesses, as well. Your credentials increase your professional standing thereby increasing customer satisfaction. People are looking for quality and reassurance when purchasing healthcare services; more so, than with expenditures that do not directly affect their bodies proper.
Then there are the new optically-spawned products developed by employees with some optically-overlapping skills.
Dyslexie, a typeface to increase the accuracy of reading by those suffering from dyslexia was developed at the Netherlands’University of Twente and there’s a two-minute video included in this link:
www.studiostudio.nl/project-dyslexie
Often a personal experience, a trauma or condition with a close friend or family member with a need is the motivation for choosing a profession for which a person feels an affinity, or maybe they use or need the service themselves.
Understanding vision pathologies/tropias and possessing the communication skills to explain them to a patient/customer is essential to assisting them in making choices to restore them to their fullest possible vision potential, even if you don’t treat, perform surgeries or prescribe/ administer drugs. Cataract Lens Implants and Lasik Surgery questions are probably part of your everyday explanations. You also need to be knowledgeable about resources outside your practice to which you can refer them. Even a background in color, light theory and design is applicable to optics, such as explaining color dispersion in polycarbonate lenses or lens-edge thickness treatments.
VisionSim is a mobile app education/forensic tool: www.brailleinstitute.org/MobileApps/VisionSim
Prosthetics started as an art form in 1952 for Robert Levy, OD:
www.ocularpro.com
This practice recently became one of the first ocularists to fit a Magnetic Prosthesis.
Iris/Retina Security Identification has been in use for several years and new applications are being activated as they are developed:
www.globalsecurity.org/security/systems/biometrics-eye_scan
Employers hire potential. Good employees are not hired; they are trained. No one’s irreplaceable, but if you’ve ever been the in-house “go to” guru, you know the great self-confidence bolster that gives. I recommend you become expert at one work aspect that really interests you. Let others be really good at the things they really like, especially if they hold no magic for you. My older daughter responded to my grandson’s inquiry about whether or not she did some particular task by saying, “I suck at that. I don’t do things I suck at.” You needn’t be a manager to access your resources, collaborate and delegate. It’s your responsibility to set the parameters of relationships that affect you. So if you’re asked to speak to the tenth bullet on your job description that you cannot perform as well as the other nine, your back is up against a wall and you’re at risk of being on the street, an effective extricator is:
“I can’t know everything. When you know everything, get back to me.”
It’s also up to you to exercise some situational judgment about whether to verbalize it or just think it for your own benefit. The hardest part is delivering that message with a smile and without a blink or a wink.
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