BLS projects 6% job growth for chemists for 2016-26; all job growth remains at 7%.

Date from the Bureau of Labor Statistics

I'm traveling at the moment, so I haven't had a chance to fully absorb these new numbers, but it looks like that BLS is revising its estimate of chemist job growth up from 3% in the 2014-24 decade to 6% in the 2016-26 decade. I think that's good news, but not really particularly exciting (~260 new jobs a year for a decade.) I guess that's better than a kick in the shins, but not much.

I think the worse news is that BLS doesn't really see any major job growth (in the double-digit range, say) during the next decade. 2 years later, and their best guess at job growth for the decade is 7%.

For those who love #chemjobs statistics...

Friend of the blog Lisa Balbes has gathered a really nice set of statistics on the basics of #chemjobs, including:

• How many chemists are there? 
• How many chemistry faculty positions are there? 
• How much do chemists make? 

...and many more questions answered. Check it out! 

Behold the power of an education in chemistry: $13/hr in San Diego

Link here.

YEEEEEEAAAAAHHHH!

Letter to the editor: Hey, where are all the ads?

Also from this week's C&EN, a funny/sad letter:

A recent issue of C&EN has just two classified ads, both for academic positions (June 15, page 37). Is this because of full employment, because downsizing is not over, or because of the summer doldrums? It makes one wonder about our chosen field of expertise. 

Richard Adams
Tucson

1. It's not because of full employment.
2. It's 45% because of the summer doldrums.
3. It's 50% because all the ads have migrated online.

Our chosen field of expertise? Well, yeah, that's a tough one... To quote the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Outlook Handbook:

Employment of chemists and materials scientists is projected to grow 6 percent from 2012 to 2022, slower than the average for all occupations.

Average for all occupations is 11%.  

The 2014 ACS Starting Salary Survey is out

Credit: C&EN, 2014 ACS Starting Salary Survey

The 2014 ACS Starting Salary Survey is out; it's a look at 2014 graduates, conducted in October and November of last year. Here's Linda Wang and Sophie Rovner's article on the issue and here's a link to the report itself (ACS membership required).

Some comments on the topline data: 

• Unemployment of 2014 B.S. chemistry graduates was 12.4%, down from 14.9% in 2013. Good news. 
• Full-time and part-employment of B.S. chemistry graduates was basically flat, with 38% with permanent, full-time positions  (37% in 2013) and 9% with part-time positions (same as 2013). 
• Median starting salaries were up/flat for B.S. chemistry graduates to $40,000 (up from 2013's 39,600.) Median starting salaries were down for M.S. grads at $52,000 (down from $55,000 in 2013) and for Ph.D. graduates $62,000 (down from 2013's $75,800.) 
• All salaries fell in measurement from 2005 constant dollars. 
• Women were 52% of B.S. chemistry graduate respondents.
• The pay gap between male and female respondents was pretty steep around 17%. 

What is noticeable to me is the relative drop in the number of students going to graduate or professional school, which reached a peak in 2009 and 2010 at 46% of students. It's 35% now, which I figure is within 2-5% of the Natural Rate of Progression to Graduate School.*  

Also, how is academia hiring in all of these B.S./M.S. chemistry graduates? Academia was the largest employer at 34% of B.S. chemists, 47% of M.S. chemists and 51% of Ph.D.s. While this is understandable for Ph.D. chemists, what about the non-Ph.D.s - are they research assistants?

Finally, as always with the Starting Salary Survey, the Eka-silicon caveat: the response rate for the 2014 ACS Starting Salary Survey was 16.4%. This is quite low, which brings into question how representative the data is of all 2014 chemistry graduates. 

This survey was performed by Gareth Edwards of the ACS Department of Research & Market Insights; he is to be commended for his continued work on this survey. 

*I'm going to register NRPGS as a trademarked acronym, kinda like Friedman and NAIRU. 

STEM is TE: salary edition

Interesting graph from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that Matt Yglesias has highlighted. I've annotated it. Fairly obvious that, in terms of salaries, STEM is TE (and a little M.) 

NSF finds chemist "involuntary out-of-field" rate is 2.0% for 2013

Via H1-b skeptic Norm Matloff's blog*, I see that NSF has reported the rate of all chemistry Ph.D.s that are involuntarily working outside of their field at 2.0% for 2013. This is defined as "Involuntarily-out-of-field rate is the percentage of employed individuals who reported, for their principal job, working in an area not related to the first doctoral degree at least partially because a job in their doctoral degree field was not available."

As far as I'm concerned, this is incredibly low, to the point where I'm rather skeptical. I'd be much more inclined to believe a higher number, but perhaps I'm wrong.

(Also, perhaps it is that Ph.D.s who work outside of their field in chemistry consider themselves 'voluntarily out of field'?)

*I label this not pejoratively, just for those who do not recognize Prof. Matloff. 

Naturejobs falls for the "PhDs have lower unemployment!" fallacy

Via Twitter, yet another alternative careers essay, this one from Annalise Smith, a graduate student at the University of Miami on the Naturejobs website:

...A Nature article published in 2011 contends that the academic positions for science PhD holders are decreasing and sectors outside of academia are unable to compensate. Yet the unemployment rate for PhD graduates in the life sciences remains at a low of 1.5%, much lower than the national unemployment rate in the United States. So are there too many PhDs? 

There are only too many PhDs if every PhD candidate envisions a career in academia....

A couple of things here:

• First, it's clear that the purpose of the essay isn't to engage with the "Are there too many PhDs" question. That's fine, but then, why bring up the statistics as if they're refutation of the Ph.D. glut theory. 
• The writer claims above that this is the unemployment rate for Ph.D. graduates in life sciences -- so far as I could tell, this is not actually true. The number "1.5%" and "life sciences" are not tied together anywhere in the report. Maybe I'm wrong. 
• Interestingly, many of the unemployment stats for recent life scientist grads are still quite low -- the most relevant number I saw in the linked 2012 NSF report (which I have no reason to doubt) is 2.1% for recent life scientist (page 3-35)
• However, my main critique of these numbers is that they're from 2008, which means that they were measuring pre-Great Recession graduates. You can see that the similar number in the newer 2014 report for 2010 recent life scientist graduates was 2.8%. (page 3-35)
• My main issue is this portion of the sentence "much lower than the national unemployment rate in the United States." It is ridiculous to compare the unemployment rate of recent Ph.D. graduates in the sciences (any sciences) to the national unemployment rate. ~30% of the US population has a B.S. degree; college graduates make up around 47% of the workforce. We should not be comparing a group of 100% Ph.D.s to a national workforce where less than 5% of the workers have a Ph.D. It is a meaningless comparison. 
• The better number to compare against is the overall unemployment rate for Ph.D.s, which was 2.2% for 2013. Of course, the problem with this is, we're now measuring all Ph.D. holders, including your tenured faculty adviser. 

Also, the writer does not consider wages or opportunity costs of getting a Ph.D. in the sciences (time-to-degree for life scientists? In 2012, 6.9 years, according to the 2014 NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates.) If you're spending two presidential terms in school, you should seriously think about whether it's worth your time, from a dollars and cents perspective. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. But those calculations weren't apparently covered in this essay.

Finally, I have a one-word answer for the writer as for why the unemployment rate of life scientists is so low: postdocs. Actually, I have another word: underemployment. If you have a Ph.D. biologist working as a QC temp at VWR, they're considered employed. 

For longtime readers of the blog, this is old hat. But for the editors at Naturejobs, apparently, this is news -- how disappointing. 

The full 2014 ACS Salary Survey is out

A brief note on the last day of a holiday weekend, courtesy of Sophie Rovner and this week's C&EN:

Unemployment is easing in the U.S. economy as a whole, and that trend is reflected in the chemical sector, according to the latest figures compiled by the American Chemical Society. “The unemployment rate of our domestic chemistry workforce is once again under 3.0%, as it was prior to the economic downturn of 2008–09,” notes Elizabeth C. McGaha, assistant director of ACS’s Research & Brand Strategy (RBS) department, which collects the data. 

“It’s good news that the drop in unemployment isn’t solely related to people taking part-time or postdoctoral work,” says Steven Meyers, assistant director of ACS’s Career & Professional Advancement department. Instead, the decrease in the fraction of ACS member chemists who are actively seeking work is “attributable to growth in full-time employment, which suggests that positions with at least 35 hours of work per week are absorbing those individuals transitioning into the workforce.” 

Unfortunately, the improving jobs situation hasn’t bolstered wages: “Salaries have still not begun to rebound to prerecession levels,” McGaha says. Even worse, “salaries for ACS member chemists in the U.S. have not kept up with inflation and therefore continue to lose ground in terms of buying power. While this is not unique to the chemical labor market, it is still a concern.”

A brief summary of the article's contents (which should be read in full):

Response rate: 23% (this has dropped significantly, with 35% for 2012 and 28% for 2013)
Full-time employed: 91.9% (highest percentage of full-time workers since 2008)
Postdoctoral percentage: 2.3% for 2014
Unemployment: 2.9%, lowest since 2008

An important caveat in the article about long-term unemployment of chemists:

...“it is certainly possible that small numbers of very long-term unemployed chemical scientists and engineers have given up on the job search or moved into non-chemistry-related fields” and therefore don’t show up in the numbers, Meyers says. “Those who have been out of work for a while and have few resources to receive further education or training will eventually take a nonideal position that at least keeps a paycheck coming in, even if it means being underemployed. Once that happens, it becomes more difficult to reenter the chemistry market. We know that some individuals are unfortunately in this regrettable situation; we just don’t have a way to measure how large their numbers are.”

If I were King of the ACS (and it is a good thing I am not), I would make measuring/finding this number a top priority.

The blue monster is winning: One of the interesting aspects of the ACS Salary Survey in recent years is its focus on how chemist wages losing ground against inflation. This year is no different.

Despite the discrepancy in the extent of unemployment, Ph.D.s are sharing the same fate as their colleagues in terms of wage increases. For all three degree levels, median wages this March were essentially the same as last year. The median salary for chemists with a doctorate was $102,000, for those with a master’s degree was $85,000, and for those with a bachelor’s degree was $72,000 (see salary trends table on page 71). 

But the story gets worse: These findings are stated in so-called current dollars, and therefore don’t account for changes in the cost of living. Calculating salaries in constant dollars—a practice that eliminates the effects of inflation—shows that chemists at all degree levels continue to lose ground with respect to the rising cost of living. 

Between 2013 and 2014, salaries adjusted for inflation fell 1.5% for each of the three degree levels. Looking at the data in the longer term highlights stark trends in chemists’ purchasing power. Compared with a decade ago, median salaries have shrunk 11.7% for Ph.D.s, 6.8% for chemists with M.S. degrees, and 7.9% for those with bachelor’s degrees, in terms of constant dollars.

This is a big problem, I would think. I would love to know which professions' median wages consistently beat inflation.

August 2014 Chemical Activity Barometer slowing a bit, but still grows

From the American Chemistry Council: 

The Chemical Activity Barometer (CAB), a leading economic indicator created by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), continued to see moderated upward growth this month, with a 0.2 percent gain over July as measured on a three-month moving average (3MMA). This represented a deceleration from the 0.4 percent gain in July and an average gain of 0.5 percent for the first six months of 2014... 

 “Consistent with other recent economic reports, including the Conference Board and the Chicago Fed National Activity Index, the Chemical Activity Barometer continues to point to a slowly expanding U.S. economy, at least through the first quarter of 2015,” said Dr. Kevin Swift, chief economist at ACC."

It would sure be nice to have consistent signs of an expanding economy, but it doesn't look like we're there yet. Sigh.

2013 ACS Starting Salary Survey: employment, starting salaries trending flat

The latest ACS Starting Salary Survey is out, in an article this morning by Susan Morrissey. This is a survey of those who graduated in the 2013 academic year.

A quick summary:

Median salaries: New B.S. and Ph.D. graduate salaries were down from 2012 (39.6k for B.S. grads, down from 40.0k, 75.8k for Ph.D. grads, down from 80.0k.) M.S. new grad salaries were up to 55k from 48.0k in 201. Interesting to see the numbers in constant 2005 dollars, which reflects those numbers even more starkly.

Employment/unemployment: Up slightly for B.S. grads to 37%, from 2012's 34%. M.S. grad employment was down slightly to 48%, with Ph.D. grad full-time employment flat at 46%. The unemployment of B.S. new grads (20%) was at an 8 year high. M.S. new grad unemployment was at 19%, the second highest in 8 years, with the exception of 2011 (23%). Ph.D. unemployment was at an eight-year low at 6%.

Like swallows to Capistrano: Surveyed chemical engineers beat out chemists on all measures, with the exception of full-time employment for M.S. chemical engineers.

Academic employment up? I don't remember this statistical category from other years, but it is surprising to me how many (B.S.: 37%, M.S.: 44%, Ph.D.: 47%) took employment in academia, as opposed to industry (30%, 35%, 24%) or "other non-manufacturing" (25%, 12%, 21%.) This doesn't include graduate school or postdoctoral fellowships (I don't believe), so it's interesting to see how many of the non-doctoral survey respondents took technician/staff positions at universities.

The Eka-Silicon caveat: The response rate for the 2013 ACS Starting Salary Survey was 17.8%. That's a pretty low number, but about typical for the Starting Salary Survey. This means that the numbers are pretty noisy from year to year, so take these statistics with a grain of salt.

If you're interested, you can read the whole thing here, and play with their statistical table applet here. 

Bureau of Labor Statistics revises expected chemist job growth from 4% to 6%, lowers material scientist job growth from 10% to 5%

BLS has released the 2014 edition of the Occupational Outlook Handbook; its entry for Chemists and Material scientists has been updated. From this, you can see that the expected chemist job growth for the 2012-2022 period is 6%, still well-below the expected job growth in the US for all occupations (11%). This is a upward revision from 2012, when the projected job growth for chemists was 4% for the 2010-2020 time period.

Also, it is interesting that material scientist job growth is now predicted to be 5% for the 2012-2022 period; it was 10% just two years ago. It would be fascinating to know (and I am efforting to find out) why material scientist job growth was revised down significantly.

Finally, I find it really troubling that the overall expected occupational job growth was just 10% for the 2012-2022, as opposed to the 14% expected 2 years ago for the 2010-2020. That's not a good sign for the overall US economy, I think.

Best wishes to all of us.

UPDATE: PQ comments to note that he was right, ~3 years in advance. Nice job, PQ! 

2013 not shaping up to be a great year for pharma: Challenger reports 19,507 jobs lost

The big news first: Challenger, Gray and Christmas (which is a company that does outplacement services for large firms, and tracks layoffs as a result) reported that there have been 19,507 jobs lost in the US pharmaceutical sector for 2013, with pharma announcing 10,585 cuts in October. That's a big number, and as you can see below, that easily beats 2012 (14,150.)

The inspiration for this chart, of course, is Matt Herper's vital and still-relevant analysis that he put together in April of 2011. John Carroll (FierceBiotech) followed it up in October 2012, and I'm just adding the relevant numbers so that the chart is up to date. (See here for the spreadsheet that the above chart is based on, I'm putting the links to the relevant Challenger press releases below.)

Since 2000 until the end of October 2013, according to Challenger's numbers, there have been 349,502 jobs lost in the US pharmaceutical industry. As Matt smartly pointed out in 2011:

"not all those people remained unemployed, and the total headcount of the pharmaceutical industry did not drop that much. Many of those who were laid off were probably hired back by other drug makers. Some folks have probably been laid off more than once. It’s also worth noting that big mergers are one reason for the cuts."

This is a vital industry, and one that I'm proud to be a part of. While I think there are definitely glimmers of hope here and there, times are still very hard. Best wishes to all of us.

Press releases: Total 2011 Challenger numbers, total 2012 numbers, October 2013 numbers.

ACS Salary Survey: unemployment down slightly, median salaries up slightly

The full article by Sophie Rovner about the 2013 ACS Salary Survey is out, and there are a variety of interesting things to comment on. The short version is that unemployment is down slightly, from 2012's 4.2% of respondents to 3.5% in 2013. Median salaries for all chemists rose between 2012 and 2013, going up 2.2%. 

Inflation: I think the most interesting graph of the article is below:

It basically shows that, since 2003, salaries for all chemists (academic, industrial, governmental, at all degree levels) have failed to keep pace with inflation (as measured in 2003 constant dollars). While you could argue that this is due to the broader economy, it's not a pretty story, especially combined with the relatively high rates of unemployment.

Unemployment: We've covered the basic unemployment numbers from the ACS Salary Survey already. Here's a problematic comparison between the US population of college graduates and ACS members that I see in the web version of the article:

I'm not convinced it's an apples-to-apples comparison when you're comparing a professional society of over 60% Ph.D.s to a college-educated labor-force with less than 10% Ph.D.s (it's probably more like 5%, actually.) 

U6-like lowest since 2008: I've long titled the sum of the percentage of unemployed chemists, part-time chemists and postdocs in the ACS Salary Survey as the "U6-like number." In other words, it's a broader measure of unemployment in chemistry ("U6" refers to BLS' broadest measurement of unemployment in the U.S.) That number for the 2013 Salary Survey was 8.9%, which is lower than it has been since 2008, when it was 7.5%. That's nice to see, even it is quite high. 

Weird geography: I don't think Andre the Chemist or I could have predicted this one: 

Unemployment rates among ACS members also varied across the U.S. The percentage of out-of-work members who were looking for a job as of March 2013 was lowest in the East North Central region,which consists of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and highest in the Pacific region. New England, which at 6.9% had the highest unemployment rate last year, saw that number drop to 4.2% this year. The unemployment rate in the Pacific region eased from 6.5% to 4.9% during that same period.

The Upper Midwest with the lowest chemist unemployment? The Pacific region with the highest? Huh? 

The Eka-silicon caveat: Ol' E-s isn't going to like this one: 

The survey was sent to a random sample of 25,000 ACS members under the age of 70. The sample excluded student, emeritus, and retired members, as well as members living outside the U.S. The survey recipients returned 7,078 complete responses, for a response rate of 28%.

I'm pretty sure a 28% response rate is the lowest we've ever seen. 

The human side of chemist unemployment: David Harwell makes some sad points about long-term unemployment amongst chemists:

Still, Harwell cautions that the unemployment numbers might be artificially lowered by a small number of out-of-work chemists who have given up on searching for a job and thus are no longer counted in unemployment statistics. “We know that some people are dropping out,” he says. “We’re seeing people leaving chemistry.” 

The situation is toughest for what he terms the “very long-term unemployed,” who find it difficult to reenter the workforce for myriad reasons. “Their connections go cold; it’s hard for them to keep up their skills,” Harwell says. “They can go back to school, but that costs money, and if they have kids or a mortgage that is also eating through their savings, they just have to do something to survive.” 

And that doesn’t mean they are “making a targeted move from one sector of professional employment to another,” says Harwell. Instead, some of these chemists are now working at retail chains or in restaurants to make ends meet.

We've still got a ways to go. Best wishes to all of us.  

Early 2013 ACS Salary Survey: unemployment falling, salaries up for some

Data from this year's C&EN article and my post from 2011

I didn't get to do a recap of last week's release of the early results from the 2013 ACS Salary Survey, written up by Sophie L. Rovner:

Unemployment is down: The unemployment rate for members is down 0.7% between 2012 and 2013. Seems to me that the decrease in unemployment has been relatively broad-based, but it's nice to see the numbers for the B.S. members dropping significantly. Elizabeth McGaha, assistant director of ACS’s Research & Brand Strategy (RBS) department (the department that does this survey), notes that full-time employment is at 91.1%, which is the highest level since 2008. Good news, I'd think.

But: I was a little bit plesantly surprised to read the comment offered by David Harwell about this drop:

David Harwell, assistant director for career management at ACS, which publishes C&EN, cautions that the latest number might be affected by unemployed chemists who have given up on new job searches and thus are no longer counted in unemployment statistics.

And salaries:  The Bureau of Labor Statistics' CPI inflation index put inflation for 2012 at 1.7%. How did ACS member chemists do?

Salaries for U.S. chemists have edged up 2.2% in 2013 compared with 2012... the overall improvement in the median salary for chemists can be attributed entirely to a rise in pay for Ph.D.s, who saw a 1.4% boost over last year, the data show. Chemists who hold a bachelor’s degree actually suffered a 2.6% drop in median salary from 2012 to 2013.

Not so well, looks like.

(The Eka-silicon caveat: We'll also have to see what the response rate for the 2013 Salary Survey was -- I know I filled mine out.)

I think we're through the very worst of the Great Recession for chemistry, but I'd like to see ACS member unemployment drop well below the median unemployment for their equivalent degree levels before I'll say that we're recovered. That, and salary increases well above inflation. That'd be nice. (It's too soon to hope for signing bonuses, right? There's your Monday morning chuckle.)

Best wishes to all of us. 

Your day's dose of cheer

Courtesy of Dean Baker and Kevin Hassett (two economists that are not exactly on the same side of the ideological spectrum) in the New York Times last month:

While older workers are less likely to be laid off than younger workers, they are about half as likely to be rehired. One result is that older workers have seen the largest proportionate increase in unemployment in this downturn. The number of unemployed people between ages 50 and 65 has more than doubled. 

The prospects for the re-employment of older workers deteriorate sharply the longer they are unemployed. A worker between ages 50 and 61 who has been unemployed for 17 months has only about a 9 percent chance of finding a new job in the next three months. A worker who is 62 or older and in the same situation has only about a 6 percent chance. As unemployment increases in duration, these slim chances drop steadily. 

The result is nothing short of a national emergency. Millions of workers have been disconnected from the work force, and possibly even from society. If they are not reconnected, the costs to them and to society will be grim. 

Unemployment is almost always a traumatic event, especially for older workers. A paper by the economists Daniel Sullivan and Till von Wachter estimates a 50 to 100 percent increase in death rates for older male workers in the years immediately following a job loss, if they previously had been consistently employed. This higher mortality rate implies that a male worker displaced in midcareer can expect to live about one and a half years less than a worker who keeps his job. 

There are various reasons for this rise in mortality. One is suicide. A recent study found that a 10 percent increase in the unemployment rate (say from 8 to 8.8 percent) would increase the suicide rate for males by 1.47 percent. This is not a small effect. Assuming a link of that scale, the increase in unemployment would lead to an additional 128 suicides per month in the United States. The picture for the long-term unemployed is especially disturbing. The duration of unemployment is the dominant force in the relationship between joblessness and the risk of suicide.

It seems to me that this would be something that the ACS' Senior Chemists Committee would be interested in talking about.

Best wishes to the long-term unemployed, and all of us. 

2012 ACS Starting Salary Survey: Unemployment, starting salaries down slightly

The 2012 ACS Starting Salary Survey is out. This survey measures unemployment for 2012 graduates; the survey was sent out in October 2012 and collection ended on January 1, 2013. The headline numbers from the article by Susan Morrissey:

• Unemployment for 2012 ACS new graduates is down 0.7% from 2011, to a still depressing 12.6%. 
• Median starting salaries are all flat, or down: 

"The largest change was for new Ph.D.s, who saw starting salaries drop to $75,000 in 2012 from $85,000 the previous year. For those earning master’s degrees, the reported median starting salary fell from $55,000 in 2011 to $49,500 in 2012. Starting salaries for bachelor’s degree earners held flat at $40,000."

(The Eka-silicon caveat: The response rate for this year's survey was 16.6%, which is slightly down from last year's 17%. E-S (and myself) would like to remind folks that this introduces a great deal of imprecision to these numbers, to the point that E-S would probably say these numbers should not be commented on.)

A couple of things that I can see right off the bat: I've always challenged the broadly-held notion that "master's chemists are 'more employable.'" For the most part, you can see that, from an unemployment point-of-view, that is not actually true. The trends for unemployment are consistently with lower unemployment correlating to education level, i.e. Ph.D.s have lower unemployment than M.S., which have lower unemployment than B.S. chemists. You can see this same trend holds true for new grad unemployment above. However, it is interesting to note that starting master's chemists seem to have the highest levels of full-time employment above. So, in that sense, the old saw is partially true.

I think it is interesting how many people get pushed into "more school/more training", across the 3 educational levels. If you believe these numbers (a big if), that means that somewhere around 30% or more of each graduating class decides to spend more time in academia. Also, the "not employed/not seeking" percentages are disappointing. It's sad to see 7-10% of each graduating class fall into that category, which does not do good things for one's career.

Finally, an interesting factlet from the article on the salary gap between men and women new grads:

The gender of graduates with less than a year of experience also affected starting salaries. Male bachelor’s degree recipients indicated that their median salary was $43,000, whereas for women, the median salary was $36,500. Similarly for Ph.D.s, the median salary for men was $81,300, and for women it was $74,000. Women who earned master’s degrees, however, reported earning more than their male counterparts—$48,000 compared with $45,000.

There's a good bit of food for thought there.

A view from the #chemjobs front lines, as it were

A good friend (and unemployed Ph.D. chemist) describes a recent scene:

Truly depressing sight on Monday.   I went to a job fair hosted by the BioSpace website.    On line, it said 6 companies were going to be there, but that didn't bother me too much.  I figured it would be like ACS conventions, you never know who going to be there until you show up.  There's a number of biotech companies in the DMV so I couldn't believe only six companies would be there.  How little do I know.   

The job fair was the in the ballroom of a hotel in Rockville.  After driving for over an hour to go 35 miles (oh how I missed rush hour traffic) I show up for a grand total of four companies*.  I'd guess there were between 200-300 of us in that room standing in line to deliver our resumes to HR drones that had no clue what a NMR instrument does. 

What was really frightening was the crowd.  It was a even distribution from grad students ready to graduate to experienced workers in their 50's. No age group dominated.  The mix was heavily slanted towards biologists and biochemists and split about 50/50 between masters and PhD's.  Gallows humor prevailed, I was talking to a guy who joked at least we have it better than new lawyers, we don't have 100K in student debt tied to our necks.

I'm tired of being in the minors waiting for the call to the big show. Life's too short to piss around looking for #chemjobs that don't exist.

 Best wishes to him, and to all of us.

*one of them being Aerotek. 

Job search stats: The Golden Years

It's time to revisit the job search stats that the blog has collected so far. As you might remember, I've divided up the modern era of chemistry employment as follows:

• The Golden Years: pre-2003 
• The Clouds Before The Storm: 2003-2007
• The Great Recession: 1/1/08 to 7/31/2009
• These Modern Times: 8/2009 - present

Today, we're covering The Golden Years:

Industrial B.S./M.S.-level position, time period, number of full apps/on-site interviews (no phone)/offers:

#22A (biologist): 1996: 10/3/1
#31: 4/1997-9/1997: 190/5/2

#17: 9/1999: 2/2/2

#22B (biologist): 1999: 10/2/1

Industrial Ph.D.-level position, time period, number of full apps/on-site interviews (no phone)/offers:

#9D: 9/1990-2/1991: 50/3/2

#9C: 4/1992: 2/1/1

#9B: 11/2000: 3/2/1

#30A: "late '90s": 15/10/8

So, not a whole bunch of data points, but what do I notice?:

• I think what I notice is that applications bear interview fruit a lot easier. 
• The number of applications (with the exception of #31) is a lot lower than These Modern Times (50+). 

I wonder -- if there are more jobs per candidate, does that mean that there will be lower numbers of applications per candidate? I would think yes, but I'm no statistician. I'll be crunching the numbers for 2003-2009 next week. 

Chemists come out worse in 2012 unemployment comparison

The latest unemployment numbers for all graduate degree holders for 2012 has been released from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I've helpfully annotated the chart with comparisons to the (skepticism-inducing*) 2012 ACS member unemployment numbers and 2012  (skepticism-inducing**) BLS "chemist and material scientist" unemployment numbers.

As you can note, chemists come out worse in every single apples-to-apples comparison on all equivalent degree holders. (I'll do the salary numbers at some point soon.)

I've been trying to figure out for a while what "recovery" looks like -- so this is one of the key markers, I think. Recovery will be when our numbers are not consistently higher than "all" degree-holders.

Best wishes to all of us.

*Not all chemists are ACS members, the survey has a very low response rate, etc., etc. 
** The Current Population Survey only surveys 80,000 households -- what's the chances of a representative mix of chemists in there?