Via chemistry Twitter, this interesting comment from a lab head at NIH:
What is happening with chemistry in America? We're losing postdocs to pharma after less than 1 year in our med chem labs. Is the job market that hot in chemistry?
I certainly have seen an uptick in hiring behavior over these past few months. My best insights into the pharma/biotech market is seen via Organic Chemistry Jobs, and it's quite clear that hiring has not slacked at all in 2021. My admittedly very conservative take is that the industrial job market is "better than it has been for a while" and "much better than 2009-2014."
Readers, what do you think? What's your sector, and how has it been?
*as a normative position, I think PIs having difficulty hanging onto postdocs is a good thing, and the situation that PIs should be put in by the employment market for chemists. High wages and strong market demand (as measured by higher real wages and more benefits) for chemists in the United States and elsewhere is a good thing, perhaps the best thing.
I'm getting a lot less resumes for a current technician-level posting than what I saw in 2017. I remember seeing a lot of depressing cases in 2017, such as multiple applicants who earned a BS or MS about five years ago and then did a string of crappy low-level Yoh/Kelly/Joule/Aerotek temp gigs in QC labs. In 2021, the applicant pool for a technician job is a mix of new graduates and people looking to move up from places like medical testing labs or manufacturing plants, and most are currently employed except for the applicants who just graduated this spring.
ReplyDeleteIn Canada it is essentially impossible to keep post-docs in organic chemistry. They are all getting offers from industry, mostly CRO/CMO.
ReplyDeleteAt my CDMO we are losing people left and right. lab rat up to department heads
ReplyDeleteThe job market is red hot, and unless it’s your dream to be a professor and lead a lab, there’s really no incentive to keep people in academi.
ReplyDeleteThe job market right now is absolutely smoking hot. I've been applying since 2014 and have never seen anything like it. Companies/positions which used to outright reject me are now offering interviews, and I'm getting many, many, more callbacks for interviews now than at any point in the past. Of course there are many confounding variables - maybe my resume as written back then sucked, I do have more experience now, etc. But point is, its never been a better time to look for a new job.
ReplyDeleteFor companies, employee retention is now a huge challenge. My company (a CMO) is especially struggling with this and we are bleeding talent at all levels, which is not good.
I started applying to jobs in q3 or q4 of 2020. I had a 50-75% response rate to all applications for interviews and every single major pharma responded to me (some about multiple roles) except Merck who never contacted me about anything, not even an automated email saying "you have been removed from contention" or something along those lines.
ReplyDeleteI can't even get anybody from Merck to even add me on LinkedIn (One I even asked twice by accident with the same result) let alone answer a job application.
DeleteEnjoy it while it lasts: There is enormous bubble about to burst. Real estate in Florida is ballooning - never a good sign. Too much money floating around, looking to invest into biopharma.
ReplyDeleteGot a timeline? Next six months? next year? next 2 years?
DeleteI agree that this kind of economy can't last.
DeleteTake advantage of this opportunity while you can - you've got a limited window to chase jobs that would be closed to you in normal economic times. Go after that senior scientist job with a bachelor's, that lab technician job if you're a sample-taker at Quest Diagnostics with a high school diploma, etc. When things go back to normal, everyone without paper credentials is going to be hitting the glass ceiling again.
I'm hiring a technician right now, and seriously considering people who would have gotten thrown out during the initial screen a few years ago.