Starting a Career in Research and Development
The monthly career advice column
Where To Start Your Chemical Industry Career?
So you’ve just graduated with a BS/MS/PhD in chemistry.
Congratulations!
Are you unsure of what to do next?
There are a ton of career paths out there to choose from in chemistry from being a lawyer, a regulatory expert, going into sales, marketing, a purely analytical role, and of course being in research and development. The career choices for chemists at any level are actually probably better than they have been in a long time with much of the world emerging from a pandemic and the labor market being favorable to the job seekers.
If you are completely unsure of what you want to do with your life as a chemist it is my humble advice to go into research and development preferably for a company. I advise those of you who are unsure about their future to go into R&D because being in R&D touches all of the other functions I mentioned above. Being a chemist who does research for a living is really quite common and it’s a great way to peek into the other career paths that you could take.
If you were ever interested in being a chemist who became a lawyer, but you were unsure about it, being in R&D at either the BS level or PhD level is a great way to gain exposure to intellectual property (IP) law. At the BS level you should get some exposure to understanding the basics of IP such as obviousness, prior art, infringement/freedom to practice, and why publishing patents can be a good thing for society. At the PhD level you will be exposed to more of everything, but you will get more responsibility on working directly with a patent lawyer, drafting language for patents, understanding claim strategies, how to design around a patent, and in general sharing some of the duties of a lawyer without any of the responsibilities. Law school is expensive and being exposed to these areas of the law are a great way to get exposure without taking out $150k in student loans for a profession you might hate.
Interested in going into the commercial side of the chemicals business such as sales, marketing, or product management? Being in R&D and on the product side you would get to work with these types of people frequently and understand if you really want to be on the road trying to sell or working across the business in marketing and product management to move projects through the development cycle. Working on product development is useful in understanding how all of the different functions of the business come together to launch new products.
While working in product development for chemicals you will often be exposed to the regulatory side of the business including being exposed to the toxic substances and controls act or TSCA and its European equivalent ECHA. If you find this work to be interesting then a career in the regulatory side of the business might be right for you. This doesn’t have to be specifically in TSCA or ECHA, but there are the regulatory codes for medical devices, pharma, and construction products to name a few.
You may even love the idea of writing for a living about science and this too is also a career often known as science communication. I suppose science communication is what I do here as well (for free) on occasion, but if you want to get paid for science communication it is possible and you can get paid for it. Research and development careers typically involve quite a bit of science communication either in writing weekly or monthly reports, presenting projects and updates to senior management, presenting at a conference, or writing a technical sales sheet for your coworkers in sales and marketing.
Don’t fall prey to the negativity that is abound out there about the current state of things and the future because it exists in every profession. Imagine how tech professionals felt in 2001 or how finance professionals felt in 2008.