Dental Lab Technician

Dental Lab Technician

Department: Department of Veterans Affairs

Location(s): Louisville, Kentucky

Salary Range: $61722 - $80243 Per Year

Job Summary: This position is in the Dental service within the Veterans Affairs Medical Center Louisville Kentucky. The incumbent functions in the dental laboratory as a fully qualified and experienced technician helping provide dental services to our veteran population His or her advice is sought on a regular and recurring basis by the staff dentists, and dental providers, helping provide high quality evidence based dental care.

Major Duties:

• Major Duties & Responsibilities The incumbent functions in the dental laboratory as a fully qualified and experienced technician helping provide dental services to our veteran population. By applying an in-depth knowledge of a full range of dental laboratory services and functions, and exhibiting the seasoned judgment normally expected by this technical specialist, he/she performs the following: Serves as a subject matter expert to dental staff on fabrication, fitting, and adjustment of dental prostheses and appliances. Oversees the storage, transport, and transfer of items to the Central Dental Laboratory for fabrication. Manages the inventory of the dental laboratory including requests for supplies and stocking teeth. Researches and evaluates new laboratory materials and techniques and recommends changes to the department to maximize efficiency, quality, and customer satisfaction. Assumes responsibility for quality and quantity of work accomplished in the laboratory and for the coordination of the work achieved through the Central Dental Laboratory. Manages work to be completed in a timely manner. Conducts minor repairs and maintenance to the equipment, and recognizes and eliminates any hazards to employees in the dental laboratory. Uses body substance isolation and universal precautions to maintain a safe environment. Applies regulatory standards for protection of patients and staff. Ensure smooth operations in the dental clinic, including office operations, as required. Maintain current knowledge of the office operation and during staff absence will provide coverage. Represent the program in standing Medical Center Committee functions. Assist in quality of care monitors and quality improvement activities. Perform the everyday functions of the dental clinic and laboratory including packaging, tracking, and logging all outgoing dental cases to the Central Dental Laboratory. Ensures infection control standards are upheld in the dental laboratory and with all transfer of products and people in and out of the laboratory. Serves in conjunction with fellow lab technicians and may offer support and teaching techniques to fellow and/or new employees and students. Performs other duties as assigned. Work Schedule: Monday- Friday 8:00am-4:30pm Telework: No Virtual: This is not a virtual position. Position Description/PD#: Dental Lab Technician/PD40268-F Relocation/Recruitment Incentives: Not Authorized Critical Skills Incentive (CSI): Not Authorized Permanent Change of Station (PCS): Not Authorized

Qualifications: To qualify for this position, applicants must meet all requirements by the closing date of this announcement, 03/24/2026. Time-In-Grade Requirement: Applicants who are current Federal employees and have held a GS grade any time in the past 52 weeks must also meet time-in-grade requirements by the closing date of this announcement. For a GS-9 position you must have served 52 weeks at the GS-8. The grade may have been in any occupation, but must have been held in the Federal service. An SF-50 that shows your time-in-grade eligibility must be submitted with your application materials. If the most recent SF-50 has an effective date within the past year, it may not clearly demonstrate you possess one-year time-in-grade, as required by the announcement. In this instance, you must provide an additional SF-50 that clearly demonstrates one-year time-in-grade. Note: Time-In-Grade requirements also apply to former Federal employees applying for reinstatement as well as current employees applying for Veterans Employment Opportunities Act of 1998 (VEOA) appointment. You may qualify based on your experience and/or education as described below: Specialized Experience: You must have one year of specialized experience equivalent to at least the next lower grade GS-8 in the normal line of progression for the occupation in the organization. Examples of specialized experience would typically include, but are not limited to: using dental laboratory material such as impression materials, plasters, stones, hydrocolloids, waxes, metals, acrylics, porcelain, and similar materials; using laboratory equipment such as hand tools, dental lathes, engines, and hand pieces, furnaces, casting machines, presses, flasks, and related equipment; using precision instruments such as articulators, surveyors, and microanalyzers; and constructing dental prosthetic appliance, fabrication of crowns, fixed and removable partial dentures, and complete denture prostheses (EXPERIENCE MUST BE SUPPORTED BY YOUR RESUME TO BE CREDITABLE). OR, You will be rated on the following Competencies for this position: Eye-Hand Coordination Physical Strength and Agility Quality Assurance Security Self Management Experience refers to paid and unpaid experience, including volunteer work done through National Service programs (e.g., Peace Corps, AmeriCorps) and other organizations (e.g., professional; philanthropic; religions; spiritual; community; student; social). Volunteer work helps build critical competencies, knowledge, and skills and can provide valuable training and experience that translates directly to paid employment. You will receive credit for all qualifying experience, including volunteer experience. Preferred Experience: Removable Prosthetics Note: A full year of work is considered to be 35-40 hours of work per week. Part-time experience will be credited on the basis of time actually spent in appropriate activities. Applicants wishing to receive credit for such experience must indicate clearly the nature of their duties and responsibilities in each position and the number of hours a week spent in such employment. Physical Requirements: The work is mostly sedentary with occasional standing and lifting of up to 50 pounds. Employees routinely uses lathes, model trimmers, furnaces and sharp tools with a potential for injury. Normal safety precautions must be followed. All tasks do not involve exposure to blood, body fluids, or tissue, but the potential to exposure exists through appliances used by a known risk patient such as seropositive HBV and HIV individuals. (OSHA Exposure Category II). For more information on these qualification standards, please visit the United States Office of Personnel Management's website at https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/classification-qualifications/general-schedule-qualification-standards/.

How to Apply: All applicants are encouraged to apply online. To apply for this position, you must complete the questionnaire and submit the documentation specified in the Required Documents section below. The complete application package must be submitted by 11:59 PM (ET) on 03/24/2026 to receive consideration. To preview the questionnaire click https://apply.usastaffing.gov/ViewQuestionnaire/12910379. To begin, click Apply Online to create a USA JOBS account or log in to your existing account. Follow the prompts to select your USA JOBS resume and/or other supporting documents and complete the occupational questionnaire. Click Submit My Answers to submit your application package. NOTE: It is your responsibility to ensure your responses and appropriate documentation is submitted prior to the closing date. Beginning September 27, 2025, Federal agencies will only accept resumes up to two pages in length to comply with the Merit Hiring Plan. Resumes longer than two pages will result in ineligibility for further consideration for the position. USAJOBS will not allow you to upload or build resumes longer than two pages, and you will need to update the resumes in your profile before applying for a job. Resumes should include information relevant to the knowledge, skills, abilities, and competencies of the position to which you are applying. VA is unable to make assumptions about qualifications if not clearly listed. Resumes must be legible so they can be reviewed for eligibility, minimum qualifications and other position requirements listed in the job announcement. Your resume must be 5MB or less. We recommend saving and uploading your resume as a PDF to maintain formatting and number of pages. We also accept GIF, JPG, JPEG, PNG, RTF, TXT, PDF, ODT or Word (DOC or DOCX). We do not accept PDF portfolio files. We recommend using a sans-serif font size like Lato, if available. Other widely available options are Calibri, Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, Open San Source Sans Pro, Roboto or Noro Sans. Make your page margins 0.5 inches. Consider using 14-point size font for titles and 10-point for the main text in your resume. The resume builder can help you create a resume using these recommendations and uses the information in your USAJOBS profile to help you get started. Helpful Hints for Creating a Two-Page Resume: Prioritize most relevant and recent experience Use concise, results focused language Align language from the job announcement Focus on demonstrating skills and competencies Remove outdated or unrelated experience Use the USAJOBS resume builder Additional guidance on this new requirement and resume building tools can be found at: https://help.usajobs.gov/faq/application/documents/resume/page-limit https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/hiring-information/merit-hiring-plan-resources/applicant-guidance-on-the-two-page-resume-limit/ Special Employment Consideration: VA encourages persons with disabilities to apply, including those eligible for hiring under 5 CFR 213.3102(u), Schedule A, Appointment of persons with disabilities [i.e., intellectual disabilities, severe physical disabilities, or psychiatric disabilities], and/or Disabled veterans with a compensable service-connected disability of 30% or more. Contact the Agency Contact for information on how to apply under this appointment authority via the Selective Placement Coordinator. The Interagency Career Transition Assistance Plan (ICTAP) and Career Transition Assistance Plan (CTAP) provide eligible displaced Federal/VA competitive service employees with selection priority over other candidates for competitive service vacancies. To be qualified you must submit appropriate documentation (a copy of the agency notice, your most recent performance rating, and your most recent SF-50 noting current position, grade level, and duty location) and be found well-qualified for this vacancy. To be well-qualified: applicants must possess experience that exceeds the minimum qualifications of the position including all selective factors, and who are proficient in most of the required competencies of the job. Information about ICTAP and CTAP eligibility is on OPM's Career Transition Resources website at http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/workforce-restructuring/employee-guide-to-career-transition/. During the application process you may have an option to opt-in to make your resume available to hiring managers in the agency who have similar positions. Opting in does not impact your application for this announcement, nor does it guarantee further consideration for additional positions.

Application Deadline: 2026-03-24