Optometrists are in great demand

Unemployment is below 0.6 percent for graduates, which effectively means full employment. Especially on career days, when the companies are queuing up to recruit both for internships and permanent work, the optometry students are made aware of their favourable employment opportunities. The optometry business is small in Copenhagen, so the industry tempts with better working hours and shorter distances to the job.

This appealed to 24-year-old Regitze Striboll Christiansen, who graduated from KEA in February 2019. Since March, she has thus been working for Poul Stig, and next summer Regitze is going to study the two-year Master’s degree programme in Optometry and Visual Science at Aarhus University.

After having stumbled upon the study description on Uddannelsesguiden (the Education Guide), Regitze applied for Optometry just after high school. Optometry combined her interest in biology with a hands-on approach to professionalism and customer contact and appealed so much to her that it outperformed her previous wish to study Chinese at the university.

When you take a Bachelor's degree in optometry, you learn about both the body and the eye's anatomy, eye diseases, communication of solutions to clients, selection and adjustment of vision corrections. The programme is a health Bachelor’s degree at the level of other similar programmes. It allows you to supplement your time of study with a partial internship in the public health service and with private ophthalmologists. And in the future, optometrists will perform some of the ophthalmologist's tasks, such as regularly taking photos of patients' healthy eyes and monitoring potential diseases by recognising and diagnosing the patient's visual anomalies.