Becoming a Radiology Technician

How do you become a radiology tech? Or, how did I become an X-ray tech? I’m going to go through some of those education requirements now.


You need grade 12 and you need 27 credits of post-secondary education. Whether it’s from a college or university including statistics, communications, human anatomy and physiology, introduction to physics, introduction to sociology or psychology, and structure and modeling in chemistry. Those are prerequisite courses to be taken prior to coming into the X-ray program at Red River.
The program itself is a 20-month diploma program at Red River College. It has an August or September start date, depending on where the long weekend falls. And it’s 8 months at Red River. So you’re going from September to April at Red River College and then starting in May you do a 12 month clinical rotation at a base site. In Winnipeg the base sites are the Health Sciences Center, Saint Boniface, Seven Oaks, Victoria General, the Grace. I think I got all of them. Brandon in rural Manitoba, as well as a lot of other rural sites. South quirk, Steinbeck Portage the Prairie, Dauphin, Boundary Trails, which is up by Warren. So it’s a lot of different areas that you can actually find a lot of different sites that you can go to for your 12-month clinical rotation.


Once you’re finished and you’ve completed the program, and passed everything, and you graduated, and it’s all happening that you have to take a national certification exam through our National Association in order to practice in the USA. You can’t just graduate from the program and go on to become an X-ray Tech in a department. You have to pass this national exam. It’s a four hour exam that you write, post-graduation and once you’ve passed that then you become certified and you can work as a Technologist anywhere in US. And then in Manitoba you do automatically become registered with the MEMRT which is our provincial association and the CAMRT which is our national association.