You Got The Job...Now What?
February Chemical Careers Issue
About a year ago I wrote some advice I wish I had when I was near graduation titled: How To Get A Job As A Chemist In The Chemical Industry. Based on my conversations with who I thought my target readers were at the time, the idea of getting a job was the #1 interest of most people. Right now, Chemjobber thinks that 2022 is the year to get a job or get a new job if you are looking. I suspect that if you really want a chemistry job and are willing to move for it due to them being Location Dependent then it’s probably going to be yours. After almost 6 years in the chemical industry I think less about how to actually get a job, but more about everything else related to it and why we are in these loops (not trying to get all Matrix here).
Hard Wired To Achieve
You might not realize it, but as scientists we are essentially taught to achieve. We design experiments to answer questions or solve problems and then we write papers or patents to communicate and exclude others from practicing that work. For many of us coming out of both undergraduate and graduate programs the idea of getting a job is exciting due to how much more money there is to be made.
To those who are resistant towards going into industry and who wish to stay in Academia you have an immense amount of respect from me. Federal funding for research always appears to be a shrinking pool of money while costs to do research at universities always appears to be rising. Getting that first job in the industry though is a real challenge and landing one is a real achievement. Kind of like getting to the top of a mountain.
The thing about getting to the top of the mountain is you are often in search of the next peak. I think after a few years of working most of us get kind of myopic about our careers. It’s easy to become focused on hitting that crazy goal to get your bonus or some of us are just trying to survive the current supply chain crisis.
I think we get trapped by our achievements and our abilities. Eventually, the idea of working on some noble mission evaporates and just saving enough money to buy a house in the neighborhood with the good schools is a top priority. “I’ve always been good at X so I’m going to focus on that,” is what I often think.
Every task that has been presented to most of us looks like an achievement of some sort. We want to pass a test, get into a good school, design a good experiment, make a new discovery, publish a peer reviewed paper, learn how to operate a new instrument, and defend a thesis. We want to get a job, make more money, buy a house, start a family, and then?
More money? Eventually you have enough. More respect or power within your company? Doesn’t really float my boat, but it’s an interesting thing to think about.
The Game That is Your Career
For the readers who are in your first job post school, welcome to the game that is your career. You’ve really got two or three actual options in front of you if you are a technical person.
You can progress in your career as a technical person either up the management ladder or up the individual contributor ladder
Move to the commercial ladder, typically as a product manager or as a sales person
Move to the operations side, perhaps regulatory compliance, quality assurance, or legal (yeah, go to law school).
The great thing about this game is there are relatively few players who are in it once you are in and you’ll see a lot of the same people over and over again. It’s a small world so treat people with respect and don’t burn bridges if you can help it. If you are interested in how high up the proverbial career ladder you can get, check out this interview I did with a chemical executive who started off in R&D.
I’m just about 6 years into this post-PhD career thing and I have no idea which direction I want to go. After thinking about this for about five years I’ve decided that I should at a minimum showcase that I can handle more responsibility. Essentially, I’ve got to pick a place, stay, and try to make things better.
Doing This For Another 30 Years
I’m not rich and neither is my wife so I suspect that I’ll be working for at least another 30 years (I’ll be 64 then), but part of my fear is that the nature of industrial R&D and product development will not stay the same for the next 30 years. I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic either. Go talk to the research fellows at your company (if they haven’t been laid off already) and ask them how things have changed. The big R&D teams that brought new innovative products to market often are gone and spending on R&D is going down.
The below graph is R&D spending from the US chemical industry in billions of dollars. There is 14% less spend on R&D comparing 2014 to 2020 or about a 2% decline per year. I do not think that this decrease in spending is due to increased efficiency. I suspect that this decline will continue and if I extrapolate it out at a 2% decline, in 30 years the US chemical industry will be spending $5.6 billion dollars on R&D when I’m ready to retire. Factor in inflation and it looks worse.
Dror Poleg explained the situation neatly in his newsletter and how employees that make new products are really just calculated bets. Dror was talking about tech companies like Google or Facebook, but I think the logic applies to chemicals too:
In such industries, the employees themselves are bets. Corporations hire tens of thousands of equally qualified people with the hope that one or a handful of them will come up with an idea that makes it all worthwhile. These companies are not recycling ideas, but they are recycling capital. They are using billions made from past successes to bet on employees who will maybe develop a future success that will help finance even more bets.
Much of the chemical industry is reliant on their past successes and the product teams in place are there to manage the current product portfolios. Maybe these teams come out with something incrementally new every few years. Ultimately, it’s about managing the business you’ve got now and acquiring any new entrants to your market that look ripe for takeover.
Start-ups might be the future of how we get new products to market. If the incumbent companies spend less on bringing new products to market every year then how is efficiency achieved?
How do these companies create wealth if there is a decrease in the engine of wealth creation?
This newsletter is my hedge against my current career. At a minimum it’s a phenomenal networking tool and at best maybe it unlocks a career I’ve never even thought of in a few years.
For the professional chemists out there let me know how you think our jobs will change in the future. I would love to hear your thoughts.
So I am a 30+ year professional in the chemical industry, mostly in organic process R&D. I'm 63 and still in the lab, though I also lead a group of chemists. I started out in a large company at a "Research Center". I started doing discovery research with a group of 6-7 other Ph.D's. I transitioned to plant support (they bought a petrochemical plant), then back to product development. When we all got laid off (5 years after a 250 million dollar investment into specialty chemicals) we transitioned into a privately held company in the same building (went from 150 people to 17!). Since then we have grown to 50 and were just bought by a larger privately held company. I would say that my time working for a smaller organization was more fulfilling, in that we got more done. Less meetings, no multi level management layers, etc.. I think that if the larger company would have held on I would have transitioned into technical management. But at the smaller company it was more like a startup, where everyone did what it took to succeed (I worked in the pilot plan moving drums, working on our 100 gal reactor, etc..). Not sure what's going to happen in the future, but I will say that if you are good at what you do, if you don't slack off, these things get noticed most of the time. I worked my way up to be the "key guy" for problems that came up within all areas of our operations. So I knew that my job was secure, in the absence of bankruptcy or other disaster.