5 Skills A Good Dental Assistant Has
Dental assisting is a lucrative and growing field, attracting many from all walks of life. Our Dental Assisting program will prepare anyone for success in the field of dental assisting, but some people may be more uniquely prepared than others.
Do you have the pre-existing skills that make for an excellent dental assistant? If you have most of these skills and are looking for a rewarding career change, maybe it’s time to consider dental assisting.
- People Skills: Can you work well with others? How about if they are stressed or in pain? Are you a team player that can share responsibilities and be flexible? Dental assistants need to work well with a wide range of patients, sometimes while in extreme pain or high levels of stress. Dental assistants also need to work with a variety of dentists and other dental assistants.
- Detail Oriented: There are many rules, procedures, and protocols which must be followed directly for good dental work. Dental assistants need to pay attention to details and follow each step of a process. Mixing up steps or forgetting tiny details can cause big problems for the patient or dentist, so you need to be reliable with every step of a procedure.
- Hand-Eye Coordination & Dexterity: If you’re good with your hands and fingers, you’d probably make a good dental assistant. You’ll need to operate tools and small machines in a patient’s mouth with extreme care and precision.
- Listening: Along with your people skills and attention to detail, your ability to listen carefully is critical as a dental assistant. You need to be able to listen to patient concerns and descriptions accurately to address the whole problem. You also need to be able to listen to the dentist as he or she shares a plan of attack or instructions for your work. This can sometimes mean listening and adapting “on the fly” as you work in a patient’s mouth.
- Organizational Skills: Dental assistants are responsible for storing, retrieving, providing, and organizing the appropriate tools for the dentist as he or she works on patients. As a dental assistant you will use organizational skills to keep tools and paperwork straight, find items the dentist needs, organize and display them in a helpful way, stay on task and within time parameters.
We will teach you everything you need to know about dental assisting, but you’ll have a big head start if you are already successful with these critical dental assisting skills.