Reddit Chemistry Jobs FAQ, part 2: getting a job in industry

In part two of the Reddit Chemistry Jobs FAQ (part 1 is here), a set of classic questions about jobs in industry. From stathicus:

Realistically, can you get a job in industry with just a B.S in chemistry in this economy? How difficult is it to find jobs in industry? Is it super competitive? 

Also, what are the chances of getting a job working for a company that would pay for graduate school? I know quite a few people who graduated with physics and engineering degrees and are now working for companies that are paying for them to persue master degrees but I haven't heard many stories about chemists getting the same deal.

From gunbladelh: "Is it easier to find a job in industry with an M.S or a Ph.D?"

From deathbyentropy: "I'm worried that I will get an Ph.D. entry level position and be worked to the point that I hate it. Are there many Ph.D. positions that only require the 9-5 +/- a few hours?"

Let's go with the numbers (as we have them*) first:

• For all ACS members in 2012, unemployment decreases with degree level (B.S.: 5.9%, M.S.: 5.4%, Ph.D.: 3.4%). 
• For ACS members that graduated in 2011, the percentage that were employed full-time did not really correlate to degree level (B.S.: 33%, M.S.: 48%, Ph.D.: 38%). (Note that a high percentage progressed further to graduate education or a postdoc.) 
• For ACS members that graduated in 2011, the percentage that were unemployed also did not correlate to degree level (B.S.: 17%, M.S.: 23%, Ph.D.: 12%).

These numbers suggest that, to understate, it is difficult to get a job in industry with just a B.S. in this economy. I believe that it can be done; I have seen it myself. What I believe has changed from five or ten years ago is the amount of effort it takes to find a job out of college. 

I worked as a B.S. analytical chemist/formulator in the late 1990s for a year; I applied to a scant number of positions with my not-particularly-impressive credentials (B.S. in biochemistry, about a year of working in a laboratory during the school year, nothing special**). Applying in January or February of my senior year (just a few months before graduation), I was able to get a full-time job doing bench science at a drug delivery company fairly easily. I don't think that's much the case anymore. I suspect that most B.S. entrants into the job market have, like a recent post of mine mentioned, been spending their summers and off hours in the laboratory getting direct work experience, either through REU-style academic internships or industrial internships. In other words, doing well at your coursework is insufficient. 

I don't think it's "super-competitive", like medical school, where it seems like the interviews have only gotten more complicated and the necessary grades and test scores have only seemed to increase over time. But I really think that some effort and planning between your sophomore and senior years is required. 

As for paying for graduate school, I think that it is relatively uncommon for companies to do this. For the most part, they want to hire you after the schooling, not before. You typically get paid to go to graduate school in the sciences; either you get a fellowship (no teaching requirement), you teach to earn your keep (teaching assistantship) or a professor pays your stipend (research assistantship.) Sometimes companies will pay for part-time or online master's programs, but I think the pool of master's students is deep enough that there's no real incentive for this. 

It has long been a truism that "master's chemists are the most employable." To a great extent, I believe that. However, I don't think there's very much outside of intuition to support that. Certainly, the numbers up above don't really show that; Ph.D. chemists have had the lowest unemployment rates of the different degree levels. I think that it is true that master's chemists have more flexibility to be hired into entry-level positions -- there are a lot of lab associate-type positions that are essentially closed to Ph.D.s. 

Finally, entry-level Ph.D. positions are not exactly 9-to-5 (more like 7-to-5), but are not the "round-the-clock and weekend" hours that you might be used to in graduate school. Industrial hours are usually somewhere around 8-to-5 (especially at the larger corporations), and weekend work is relatively rare (or even sometimes forbidden, from a safety perspective.) You're low person on the totem pole, and so you'll be expected to put in your hours, but, compared to graduate school, it's relatively relaxed (emphasis on "relatively.") (UPDATE: See Arr Oh and The Aqueous Layer add their wisdom, basically cautioning that while you won't be worked to death, but you will still want to work hard.)

More questions to be answered next week! 

*ACS surveys have statistical issues; they're surveys of the members (not all chemists are members) and the response rates can be quite low (for example, the response rate of the Starting Salary Survey was 17%, so the fuzziness of those numbers is high.) 

**Outside of class-required labs, I had 2 summers of molecular biology-oriented laboratory experience and 1.5 academic years of undergrad research under my belt. Hard to say if that's a lot or a little, but I didn't have a ton of papers to show for it.