1. Analysts sort jobs into more than 800 occupational groups. What’s the official name of this group?
The headline for this story refers to dental assistants, but the official classification by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is Dental Assistants (31-9091). The six-digit number is the category’s occupational code, which can be used to find relevant information in federal reports.
2. What are the duties and responsibilities for the workers who hold these jobs?
Here’s the description issued by BLS: "Assist dentist, set up equipment, prepare patient for treatment and keep records."
3. How much education is required to enter this field?
BLS tracks the educational attainment of the nation’s dental assistants. Here are the highest levels of schooling they have completed:
- Doctoral or professional degree: 1.6%
- Master’s degree: 0.8%
- Bachelor’s degree: 9.0%
- Associate’s degree: 20.5%
- Some college, but no degree: 39.5%
- High school diploma: 25.3%
- No high school diploma: 3.2%
4. How many of these jobs are there?
There are 1,000 dental assistants in Erie and Niagara counties, according to the latest BLS estimates. The corresponding national total is 327,290.
5. What are the future prospects for this field?
BLS has issued long-range national projections for the period from 2014 to 2024. It predicts that there will be 13,750 openings across America for dental assistants each year during that span, encompassing both new jobs and replacements. It also projects that the field’s total employment will expand by 18.4 percent over the 10-year period.
6. How prominent are these jobs in the local economy?
The best way to find the answer is to examine a cross-section of the Buffalo area’s employment base. If we take a representative local sample of 1,000 jobs of all types, precisely 1.828 of those positions would belong to dental assistants.
7. Is that a typical distribution?
BLS has devised an obscure, yet useful, statistic known as location quotient (LQ). A reading higher than 1.00 indicates that the number of workers is higher than the typical total for a market of the same size, while an LQ below 1.00 is a below-average concentration. The location quotient for dental assistants in the Buffalo area is 0.78, which is 22 percent below the national average.
8. How much do these jobs pay?
Compensation is calculated on either an hourly or an annual basis for most categories. The average pay for dental assistants in the Buffalo area, according to the latest BLS report, is $17.98 per hour or $37,400 per year. The annual figure is 1.3 percent below the national average of $37,890 per year.
9. An average gives a sense of mid-range salaries, but what about the highs and lows?
BLS generates a pair of pay ladders for most jobs — one at hourly rates, another on an annual basis. Pay is determined for five different percentiles: the 90th, 75th, 50th, 25th and 10th. The 90th percentile, for example, is higher than the pay for 90 percent of the local workers in a given occupation, but lower than the other 10 percent. (The 50th percentile is also known as the median.) Here is the hourly pay ladder for dental assistants in the Buffalo area:
- 90th percentile: $23.25 per hour
- 75th percentile: $21.02
- 50th percentile (median): $17.88
- 25th percentile: $15.37
- 10th percentile: $13.54
10. And what about the local pay ladder for dental assistants on an annual basis?
- 90th percentile: $48,350 per year
- 75th percentile: $43,720
- 50th percentile (median): $37,190
- 25th percentile: $31,980
- 10th percentile: $28,160
11. Is there any way of comparing these figures to national rates?
BLS, as you might expect, also generates U.S. pay ladders for any given category. Below is the nationwide breakdown of annual pay for Dental Assistants (31-9091), which you can match against the local figures above:
- 90th percentile: $52,000 per year
- 75th percentile: $45,170
- 50th percentile (median): $36,940
- 25th percentile: $30,410
- 10th percentile: $25,460
12. How does the Buffalo area stack up against its fellow Upstate New York markets?
The average annual pay for dental assistants, as already noted, is $37,400 in the Buffalo area. The next list contains the comparable figures for Upstate’s other metropolitan centers. Each is followed in parentheses by its percentage variance above or below Buffalo’s average:
- Albany: $36,940 (-1.2%)
- Rochester: $39,160 (4.7%)
- Syracuse: $35,300 (-5.6%)
13. What about other areas around the country?
BLS calculates salary data for hundreds of metropolitan areas. We’ve reduced that list to 10 markets that attract a significant number of workers from the Buffalo area. Here are the annual averages for dental assistants, again followed in parentheses by the percentage that each market deviates above or below the corresponding average of $37,400 for Buffalo:
- Austin: $41,280 (10.4%)
- Charlotte: $42,130 (12.6%)
- Chicago: $38,280 (2.4%)
- Las Vegas: $35,530 (-5.0%)
- Los Angeles: $37,560 (0.4%)
- New York City: $36,630 (-2.1%)
- Orlando: $36,970 (-1.1%)
- Phoenix: $38,860 (3.9%)
- Pittsburgh: $35,250 (-5.7%)
- Tampa: $37,870 (1.3%)