1. HELPING CHEMISTS FIND JOBS IN A TOUGH MARKET. 2. TOWARDS A QUANTITATIVE UNDERSTANDING OF THE QUALITY OF THE CHEMISTRY JOB MARKET.
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| Source: Matthew Herper |
What's the job market like for chemists? Dude -- it's always bad.*
How bad is it? How the heck should I know? Quantifying the chemistry job market is what this blog is about. That, and helping chemists find jobs.
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(*For the literal-minded, this is a joke. Mostly.)
I truly hate the Boston Consulting Group, maybe because I'm still bitter about their role in my layoff a few years ago....
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's hard not to see a bunch of MBAs using this as an excuse to move all R&D to the lowest cost of labor location.
ReplyDeleteAlso, it's hard not to see this slide as being subtitled "This is Why You Suck".
It's a bit presumptuous to equate pharma and the entire market for "scientific labor", isn't it?
ReplyDeleteA8:25a: Fair enough. Change made.
ReplyDeleteThis of course does not mean that the rest of the employment market for the industrial chemists in this country is not heading for the crapper.
ReplyDeleteLow-hanging fruit is on the decline, yes.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, I wonder if they overlaid a graph of researchers' average years spent working at one company over the same time frame the slope would be very similar.
@Anonymous 8:51
ReplyDeleteDoubtful. Note that it's an exponential decay. If people worked 30 years in 1950, then by now it would be ~ 6 months.
On second thought...
I think the other trend that should be simultaneously plotted on this is Revenue/NME. I'm not a pharma chemist, but my understanding is that if the market for a particular drug isn't X billion dollars, it gets tossed. R&D is likely producing similar numbers of compounds, but since a multiple billion dollar business case can't be made, it is killed before being put in the FDA approval process.
ReplyDeleteI would hope those MBAs are not just looking at that chart on face value. Of course, that is asking a lot out of those guys.
A12:02: I could be wrong, but I think the "Go Big or Go Home" mentality has left Big Pharma. I think that these days, any source of revenue is worth pursuing.
ReplyDeleteHmm, in that case, is the cost of getting an official NME from the FDA increasing, leading to fewer applications?
ReplyDeleteI wonder how employment trends have changed relative to this graph? Is this partly a problem with losing scientists so the remaining ones are stretched thinner?
ReplyDeleteDOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!! Okay, seriously thinking about that MBA program now...
ReplyDelete