The vacancy rate for radiographers has dipped for the eighth year in a row, and now stands at 2 percent, according to a new American Society of Radiology Technologists survey, indicating an increasingly tight job market for X-ray techs. The survey also revealed broader trends in imaging, such as the overwhelming shift of mammography departments to digital imaging. The vacancy rate reflects the number of jobs for technologists that are open and actively recruited. While it has barely changed since last year, when an ASRT survey found it stood at 2.1 percent, it has dropped considerably since the turn of the century. In ASRT’s inaugural 2003 staffing survey, the vacancy rate was a high 10.3 percent. The average number of full-time radiographers employed per imaging facility also fell from 10.6 in 2010 to 9.3 this year, according to the survey. Vacancy rates also declined in six other specialties since 2003, the group said. For CT technologists, it fell from 8.5 percent in 2003 to 2 percent in 2011; for MRI techs, from 9 percent to 2.5 percent; for mammographers, from 7.2 percent to 1.7 percent; for nuclear medicine techs, from 10.9 percent to 1.4 percent; for cardiovascular-interventional techs, from 14.6 percent to 3.5 percent; and for sonographers, from 11.7 percent to 3.4 percent.

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