Monday, March 26, 2012

ACS Strategic Plan: less than impressive on #chemjobs

From this week's Chemical and Engineering News, Bill Carroll Jr. points to the American Chemical Society's Strategic Plan for 2012 and beyond. Goal 1 is to "Provide information: Be the most authoritative, comprehensive, and indispensable provider of chemistry-related information." Goal 2 is to "Advance member careers: Empower an inclusive community of members with networks, opportunities, resources, and skills to thrive in the global economy."

It's instructive to look at the section of the plan where they present their summation of the current #chemjobs situation and what they're going to do about it:

Challenges and opportunities:
  • Many chemists, in the wake of regional and global economic crises, face challenges obtaining full employment.
  • The Society's ability to help support job creation and career growth in the U.S. provides an opportunity to attract members.
  • There is a need for increased awareness of the variety of career opportunities available to chemistry-educated professionals.
  • Scientific professionals are not always aware of the array of career-enhancing services provided by ACS.
  • Interactions and collaborations between industry and academia are increasing; however, big gaps remain.
"Ongoing activities" include the ACS Network, ACS meetings, the electronic issue of C&EN (?), ACS Careers and their international membership activities. Recent activities include the free provision of SciFinder for unemployed members and the ACS Entrepreneurship Initiative. 

I'm less than impressed by this set of ongoing and recent activities. I'm even less impressed by the  euphemistic term "challenges obtaining full employment" to describe record-high unemployment. 

What would I do to change matters? Hard to say -- an easy one to me would be to offer discounted or free ACS journal access to unemployed members for the duration of their unemployment. Readers?

1 comment:

  1. They've been trotting out this same line of tripe since 2008 and have yet to make any of the improvements they keep promising. And yet the ACS keeps sending letters bragging how they're the world's largest scientific society and that you can win a free blanket if you sucker someone into giving them more money.

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20