Does a Career as a Mortician Interest You?

Until someone actually experiences the death of a close friend or family member, that person will rarely have an opportunity to know of all that is involved when preparing and performing a funeral service. For the most difficult and involved aspects of a funeral, most of the times a funeral home is hired to oversee and direct their carrying out. Also known as morticians and undertakers, funeral directors are the last people that will come into close contact with the remains of the deceased before finally being buried. As such, from specific training in entrepreneurship and mortuary sciences, becoming a mortician may not be as easy as some would think.

On your path to becoming a mortician, your mortuary science program will include many courses from other disciplines, most notably those of the medical fields. Naturally, classes such as physiology, anatomy, and those involving body restoration techniques will be a considerable amount of your studies. Mortuary science students must also become licensed embalmers, learning how to properly clean a dead body, drain it of the blood and replace this with embalming fluid. Mortuary science programs will also have to include courses involving funeral logistics, since morticians must be familiar and up to date with the processes and technologies involved in storing and transporting dead bodies.

In addition to the courses focused on the preparing the dead bodies, mortuary science programs must also give students a good foundation in owning and managing a business enterprise. Students will benefit from having leadership and sensitivity training, along with their accounting and business management courses, since a major part of the funeral service industry is guiding employees and gently handling mourning customers. A growing trend among mortuary students is taking a number of intensive psychology and counseling courses, as more funeral homes are now beginning to offer grief counseling services to their clients. More than just the business that takes and buries dead bodies, more funeral homes are offering entire funeral service packages, covering even the most mundane things like sending notices and obituaries in newspapers.

All states have licensing requirements for morticians to abide by, though most will require them to be at least 21 years old with two years of formal education in the field. Most morticians must work inconsistent hours at times, working nights, weekends, and holidays, since no one can really predict when people will die. However unfortunate as it may be for the loved ones left behind, for people in the funeral services industry it is a good thing that everyone will die at some point in time.

If these occupational challenges, along with those of handling dead bodies and grieving families, do not bother you, go ahead and study mortuary science—you will almost be guaranteed a job somewhere on the planet.