Earn a Pharmacy Technician Certification. Browse Schools for Online Training Courses & Degree Programs

Quick start to qualify for good jobs
It may take a 6 year degree plus an internship to get a degree as a pharmacist, but you can work in a pharmacy with a degree that takes less than two years to achieve. You can become a pharmacist assistant through one of the numerous pharmacy technician training programs available with online study. The pharmacy technician does many of the same tasks that a pharmacist is licensed to perform, but the assistant works under the supervision of the pharmacist and therefore does not need as much education. The pharmacy technician also makes life less hectic for the pharmacist as the assistant takes care of a lot of the customer service, insurance filing, ordering of stock, and sales counter management.
read more »

The friendly local drug store where your pharmacist—once called an apothecary—knew as much about your medication as your doctor did and had multiple options to help relieve your symptoms is a thing of the past. Demands on today's pharmacists are complicated by government controls, insurance requirements, requests from doctors and hospitals, and data base management to ensure that a customer is not obtaining multiple refills of a prescription from different drug stores. Filling a single prescription is now a process that can take 30 to 45 minutes. Many of the required checks and procedures are bureaucratic paperwork—except that it's now down on computer—that can easily be completed by an assistant while the pharmacist handles the actual medication itself.

Obtaining the certificate as a pharmacy technician will not only make you qualified for a job; it is also an excellent way to find out if careers available in pharmacy are the kind you want. If so, you can then return to classes and become a pharmacist yourself. In a large pharmacy, the pace can be quite hectic. You will often see five or six people working behind the pharmacy counter, and usually only one of them is actually a licensed pharmacist. The rest of the employees are pharmacy technicians.

Good Wages for Starting Salary
If you want to earn your degree quickly, the online method is the way to go as you can complete all of your courses in 3 to 6 months while a traditional college would take about two years. You will have a certificate, not an associate degree, and you will have to take the Pharmacy Technician Certified Board Exam. You can count on earning about $26,000 a year, but you can change that by simply completing the associate degree once you have the finances to do so. You don't need a prior degree or experience to get started, but the one thing you will need to have under your belt is either a high school diploma or a GED. Also, some schools may have laboratory requirements, so check out your program thoroughly before signing an agreement.

« back to top