Clinical and laboratory work
What does a Radiographer (X-ray and MRI) do?
Taking the tests, scans and records the rest of healthcare relies on.
What the day is like
- Indoors, under a roof.
- People all day.
- Right or wrong, to a standard.
- Answerable for your own work.
The facts
- Pay
- $81,390 a year, median
- Radiologic and MRI Technologists, May 2025
- Usually needs
- Associate's degree
- A year or two, often while earning something.
- Jobs
- +5% projected change in jobs, 2025-2035 projections
- Demand looks growing slowly
What is good about it
- You answer for your own work rather than for other people, which suits more people than admit it.
What people find hard about it
- Repeating the same scans
- Radiation protocols
- Patients in pain
Software reads images better every year; taking good images and spotting a bad one is the durable part.
Will machines take this job?
What machines will do to this work. Reading images and samples is being automated fastest; taking them well, and knowing when a result is wrong, is not.
How to find out whether it suits you
Shadow in an imaging department and ask how they handle frightened patients.
Would this actually suit you?
CareerDNA works that out from what you choose rather than from what you say about yourself: two minutes of choosing between real jobs, a few puzzles, and some questions about what you are like. It is free, it saves as you go, and it will tell you plainly where the answer is thin.