Audiologist Career

Audiologist Job Description

Audiologists help people suffering from hearing, balance, and ear ailments and disorders. An audiologist will ascertain the nature and level of hearing impairment and will employ habilitation and re-habilitation services.

The audiologist’s job description also entails carrying out and making deductions from various tests, such as air and bone conduction tests and speech reception and discrimination tests, and determining the degree of damage and impairment, location of the damage and its influence on speech and understanding.

He also uses technical testing devices to find out the patient’s aptitude to distinguish sounds or hear properly, to make diagnosis and to settle on the best treatment option.

The audiologist sketches and implements: prevention, habilitation, and re-habilitation services, such as hearing-aid selection and orientation, lip reading, auditory training, language habilitation, and speech conservation.

An audiologist may even conduct research in pathology, physiology, bio-physics, or psycho-physics of the auditory system.

Audiologist Education, Certification and Training

• To become an audiologist, you must complete a 4 years Bachelor’s degree, a 2-3 year’s Master’s degree, and a 4 years Doctoral degree.
• The basic education requirement used to be only a Master’s degree; however, many institutes now demand a Doctor of Audiology degree too.
• You must appear for the national exam on audiology granted by the Praxis Series of the Educational Testing Service.
• A specialty certificate needs additional education, appearing for a standardized examination and definite hours of hands-on training and experience.
• Some also demand audiologists to be licensed, with continual education, which is essential for license renewal.
• Furthermore, some states ask for a special license to provide hearing-aids.

Audiologist Jobs

Audiologist’s job opportunities are expected to rise faster than the average for all occupations through the year 2018. However statistics say, there will be a tiny number of job openings for audiologists, because the profession is comparatively small.

Prospects look good for those who have a Doctor of Audiology degree, and for those who do not mind moving to locations that have older populations.

By and large, audiologists work in healthcare set ups. A sizeable portion provides services to schools. Some audiologists have private practices, whereas others are employed at colleges / universities, clinics, hospitals, special speech and hearing centers, and government agencies. A few audiologists are researchers.

Audiologist Salary

The mean salary of an audiologist is approximately $63,230 per year. By and large, the audiologist salary depends on his training, experience, employer and location.