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Key statistics

The identity block — every fact is canon, none is generated.

3 of 8

Track

Individual contributor

Family rungs priced

P1 · P2 · P3 · P4 · P5 · P6

29-0000

retail_hospitality

Coordinates

3 / 4 spaces

pay@2 · 2026-07

What this role is

Licensed eye care professional who independently examines patients' vision and eye health and prescribes corrective lenses or treatment. At the Mid-Level Professional (P3) level, the role owns features or a sub-system end-to-end, adapts existing approaches, and drives project / team outcomes. Mentors juniors informally.

What this level does

Own the daily running of a single optical department, coordinating dispensing workflow, sales floor coverage, and lab turnaround to meet service targets
Supervise optical staff including scheduling, onboarding, and day-to-day coaching, and mentor associates through fitting and dispensing techniques
Ensure compliance with safety and health regulations and applicable state opticianry licensing requirements across the team
Handle escalated or complex dispensing cases (high prescriptions, progressive fits, remakes) that associates cannot resolve
Track store optical KPIs — capture rate, remake rate, sales per exam — and make data-informed adjustments to inventory mix and staffing

Knowledge applied: Applies broad dispensing and store-operations knowledge to run a single optical department and resolve complex prescription cases.
Complexity & problem solving: Evaluates identifiable operational factors — KPIs, remake rates, staffing — to keep the department on plan and handle escalations.
Collaboration & interaction: Networks across exam, front-desk, and lab teams; coordinates and coaches optical staff.
Typical experience: 5+ years in optical dispensing with supervisory exposure; certification and licensure as required.

Skills at this level

Optical measurement and dispensing: — Applies dispensing metrics for fitting, determines eyewear best suited to the patient's needs, and uses optical instruments such as lensometers, calipers, and lens gauges to check and verify prescription metrics.
Prescription and product decision-making: — Decides which lens materials, coatings, and frame designs are most appropriate for each customer's prescription, preferences, and lifestyle, and determines what adjustments a given pair of eyeglasses requires.
Frame repair and adjustment: — Repairs broken frames by hand, fine-tunes fit, and educates customers on how to wear and maintain glasses and contact lenses to preserve fit and prescription accuracy.
Optical sales and customer service: — Sells high-end optical products and services confidently by clearly explaining frame and lens options and eyewear care in terms customers understand, balancing technical dispensing skill with retail selling ability.
Optical inventory management: — Assesses frame and lens inventory, places vendor orders, receives and profiles new merchandise, maintains displays, and performs periodic inventory reconciliation for the optical department.
Lab work-order preparation: — Prepares complete and accurate work orders for optical technicians to manufacture lenses, specifying the measurements and prescription metrics needed for correct fabrication.
Optical staff supervision and development: — Hires, trains, schedules, and evaluates optical staff, and coaches and develops dispensers to the next level while ensuring a high standard of customer service.
Optical operations reporting and compliance: — Maintains and files daily and weekly optical reports and ensures the department complies with applicable safety, health, and state opticianry licensing regulations.
Optical P&L and business growth: — Owns the optical P&L, drives profitability through assortment, margin, and vendor-term decisions, and takes ownership of the growth of the optical business at store, regional, or enterprise scope.
Multi-site optical strategy: — Sets and standardizes dispensing practices, pricing, and operating standards across a district, region, or enterprise, allocating inventory, talent, and capital across an optical portfolio to shape the future of optical services.

Model-authored from 22 retrieved sources, then adversarially reviewed by an independent judge panel and held to a minimum-evidence floor before publication. Distinct from corpus-extracted content, which is labelled as such.

Pay across the ladder

Optical — median with , by . Real canon data.

National-base pricing — this family's function differential is pending review, so dollar levels are not function-adjusted (level-over-level % is unaffected).

Pay figures are modeled estimates from our market equation — level-differentiated, with honest-wide bands. They refresh as new leveling evidence lands; treat per-role dollars as directional.

Demand — is the field growing, or just turning over?

SOC 29-0000 · national

Employment growth 2019–2024, BLS OEWSobserved

+6.3%Optometrists · United States

39,420 → 41,890 jobs

2,400 openings / year, split into:

growth 382

replacement / exits 2,018

Growth — new jobs (16%)Exits — backfill (84%)

16% of hiring here is genuine expansion; the rest backfills people who move on.

Projected growth 2024–34 expanding: +8.0%
Growth share of hiring: 16%
Exit / retention pressure moderate: 84%
Openings / year: 2,400

Two quantities, kept apart: observed = employment growth differenced from two BLS OEWS vintages (what already happened); projected = BLS Employment Projections 2024–34, openings decomposed into growth + exits (growth derived from projected employment change). Neither is a pay figure.

Where this role sits — growth vs. pay

level P3 held

Demand axis is projected growth (not raw openings — that just measures churn). A curated, de-duplicated set of recognizable occupations held at this level; this role is highlighted.

Where it pays — by metro

OEWS metro median

San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA$134k

San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA$120k

Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV$111k

Boulder, CO$110k

Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA$110k

Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH$105k

Lexington Park, MD$102k

Trenton-Princeton, NJ$102k

Pay only — metro-level demand isn't in public data (it needs job postings). National median $80k; the demand-cube initiative will add growth-by-metro.

What changes across the ladder

Level-distinction canon isn't available for the adjacent levels of this profile yet.

Level differentiators

What separates P3 (P3 — Mid-Level Professional) from the levels around it — this level only. Every word is real canon for this profile.

Scope: Features or a sub-system end-to-end
Autonomy: Works independently on standard work; reviewed on the non-standard
Complexity: Diverse problems; adapts existing approaches
Impact: Project / team outcomes
Decision rights: Owns implementation decisions for own scope
Leadership: Mentors juniors informally

Full level-by-level matrix (side by side across the ladder) lives on the Ladder drill-down — not here.

Promotion

The next rung from P3 is P4.

Performance criteria for this profile render in the assessment kit →

People also watch

Nearest coordinate neighbors — same , same level. Each row's (confident / review / no match) comes from its — computed, not curated.

Profile	Key	Median	Δ structural
Chief Vision Care Officer	jf_optical::E3	$352,063†	confident0.06
Optical Manager	jf_optical::M3	$120,351†	confident0.06
Senior Optical Assistant	jf_optical::S3	$49,566†	confident0.06
Optometrist	jf_optical::P2	$72,357†	confident0.06

†National-base pricing — this family's function differential is pending review, so the dollar level is not function-adjusted.

Capability cluster

O*NET 29-1041

Core to this role. Click any element with an ⓘ for its O*NET definition. A job-specific capability model (SkillFrame) will sharpen this and add worked examples.

The Job Swatch

P3

jf_optical::P3

Optometrist

Optical

The swatch is JobFrame's core primitive: a hueset deterministically by the role's superfunction, the profileKey as its color code, the level ladder, and a content fingerprint. Two swatches that look alike are alike.

Because every role carries computable coordinates, similarity, leveling, and pricing become measurable instead of arguable— the whole point of "Pantone for jobs."

Structural

structural@1

Where it sits— position in the work taxonomy + level (weighted Gower, level > function > focus).

Track: P
Superfunction: retail_hospitality
Function: store_operations
Family: optical
Universal level: 3 / 8

Content

content@2

What it's about— a fingerprint over the role's tasks & capabilities.

Two roles can sit far apart structurally yet be close in content — that gap is itself a signal.

3-state matching

How any two swatches compare — a real distance in coordinate space, resolved to a calibrated verdict (never a fake "94% match").

Cashier · P3review0.17

Loss Prevention · P3review0.17

Pharmacy · P3review0.17

Product Specialty · P3review0.17

Store Management · P3review0.17

General · P3review0.17

Editions — frozen & versioned

structural@1live

Released 2026-06-17

content@2live

Released 2026-07-28

pay@2live

Released 2026-07-02

semantic@1live

Released 2026-07-02

Coordinates belong to a frozen, versioned edition — a coordinate computed today still means the same thing next quarter. Re-fitting issues a new edition, so comparisons are never silently redefined.

How to read this profile

Every number here is traceable — to a named source, a stated method, and an as-of date — and each value is labeled by how we know it: observed from data, computed by a model, projected forward, or governed canon. Nothing is a black box, and nothing is invented to fill a gap.

Where every number comes from

What	Source & method	Edition	State
Median pay + range	JobFrame pay equation (function base × family multiplier × level × focus differential)	pay@2	computed
Pay across the ladder	Same equation applied at each universal level	pay@2	computed
Demand — growth & openings	BLS Employment Projections; openings decomposed into growth + exits	EP 2024–34	projected
Pay by metro	BLS OEWS metropolitan medians	OEWS 2024	observed
Level distinctions	JobFrame universal-level canon (scope · autonomy · complexity · impact · decision rights · leadership)	canon	canon
Capability cluster	O*NET Knowledge / Skills / Abilities	O*NET 29-1041	computed
Coordinates	JobFrame coordinate system — structural (weighted Gower) + content fingerprint	structural@1 · content@2 · pay@2 · semantic@1	computed
Related roles	Nearest neighbors in the structural coordinate space	structural@1	computed

The principles behind the numbers

Ranges, not false precision

Pay is P10 · median · P90, never a single misleading number.

Three honest states, never a fake %

Role matches resolve to confident / review / no-match — a calibrated verdict, not a made-up percentage.

Provenance on every value

Each number carries whether it's observed, computed, projected, or canon — so you always know how much to lean on it.

Gaps shown as gaps

When a figure isn't available at the grain you need, we say so — we don't fabricate a number to fill the cell.

Frozen, versioned editions

Pay and coordinate editions are pinned, so a comparison you make today still means the same thing next quarter.

Privacy by min-N

Any aggregate over people is suppressed below a minimum count, so no individual is identifiable.

Freshness

As of2026-07-30Editioncanon-v2@2.1.0-completeSourcecanon-v2 cell + salary-benchmark (model)