Pet Career Weekly - for future vet assistants
You don't need vet school to work in a vet clinic
Every week, one free email with honest answers about working as a veterinary assistant: how people get in, who does what, and what clinic work is really like.
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What lands in your inbox
How people really get in
The usual starting point, the first skills, and why you don't need vet school to work in a clinic.
Who does what in a clinic
Vet, vet tech and vet assistant are three different jobs, explained plainly.
What the job is really like
A day on the clinic floor: the patients, the owners, and the parts nobody photographs.
One real piece of the craft
A clinic skill, a busted myth, or an owner's question you'll learn to answer.
The questions future vet assistants ask
01
How do people become vet assistants, and how long does it take?
02
What's the difference between a vet assistant and a vet tech?
03
What does a vet assistant actually do all day?
04
Can you make a living as a vet assistant?
05
Is clinic work emotionally hard?
06
Is it too late to switch careers and work in a vet clinic?
From a recent issue…
“She never goes outside. Why does she need a rabies shot?”
It is one of the most reasonable questions a front desk gets, and answering it badly is how a client ends up feeling sold to. The answer has two halves, and only one of them is about the individual cat.
The first half is clinical. The 2020 AAHA and AAFP feline vaccination guidelines put rabies among the core vaccines for pet and shelter cats, alongside the respiratory and panleukopenia vaccines, rather than treating it as an optional extra for outdoor animals. So the recommendation does not actually turn on whether a particular cat gets out.
What makes this answer land is that it does not pretend the client's reasoning was wrong. An indoor cat genuinely is at lower risk. It is just that a vaccine requirement written into public health law is not a calculation about one animal, and a bat in a bedroom is the case everybody in the profession has heard about.
Being able to give an answer that respects the question is a front-desk skill worth more than most of the clinical facts you will memorise.
Written for people who want to be in the room when an animal needs help
Pet owners who are always the calm one at every veterinary visit.
Shelter volunteers who are drawn to the medical side of the work.
Science-curious animal lovers who want clinic work without years of vet school.
Career changers who want work that feels like it matters, at any age.
Brought to you by The Academy of Pet Careers
Pet Career Weekly comes from The Academy of Pet Careers, a pet career trade school that has been teaching people to work with animals since 1993. From our campus in St. Charles, Missouri, and online, we teach dog training, dog grooming and veterinary assisting to students from across the country. Everything we teach starts from Pet Empowerment, our force-free, science-based approach to how animals learn and feel. This newsletter shares what we've learned along the way, free, with anyone curious about a career with dogs.
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Explore Dog GroomingBecome a Vet Assistant
An in-person program of about five months, taught by a Registered Veterinary Technician.
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