IOA SILMO International Optician of the Year winner Grant Hannaford

A week on from winning the IOA SILMO international Optician of the Year Award, Grant Hannaford writes, “A week after having received the award, things are starting to feel more normal and I have had some time to reflect on everything. This is perhaps the single greatest honour I have received and it should go without saying that I am humbled to have been considered, yet alone to have won. 

“I have spent quite some time thinking about how I got to this point and have spoken or had contact with most of the people who I wanted to thank directly, so to list everyone here might be redundant. Suffice it to say that the list covers my family, teachers, mentors and colleagues who gave me the latitude to follow my somewhat unconventional pathway in my career. I would encourage everyone in our industry to allow themselves to look beyond the standard progression pathways, if there is a course or degree that is plucking at your interest, do it. It may well be the thing that unlocks your next phase in your career, and that may not even be apparent once your have completed it. It can take years for these things to coalesce. 

“More broadly I have had the opportunity to consider what led me here in terms successes and failures. It would be easy to think of this point in my life as the totality of a simple calculation of successes and failures, like numbers that I could tally up in columns, but the reality feels more complex than that. While every success or progression certainly has meaning and contributes the whole, I have realised that failures perhaps carry as much weight in the in the grand scheme. In the moment they feel like set backs but over time they carry lessons in and of themselves that render every experience, good or bad, as a source of knowledge and even wisdom. So there is risk in every chance we take, personally and professionally. We will all fail at one time or another, but at some point we have to look past the risks and just ‘begin’.

“On that note, what comes next for this coming year? We have new cohorts for AAOO that are coming online globally as well as new course streams that we have been developing for industry. We have a number of webinars coming up across the year that will hopefully be of interest to everyone building on the work we have done thus far. Our team at the practice is doing wonderfully and we are looking to grow further through 2023 with additions to the team and the integration of new opportunities that our research is uncovering in terms of best practice models.  At UNSW my work with the dispensing and optics education is ongoing and I have opportunities there that are developing in exciting directions. Finally, I am looking forward to progressing through my doctoral research into ocular biometry and emmetropisation, which I believe is the next frontier in our industry.”