Thursday, May 19, 2011

Daily Pump Trap: 5/19/11 edition

Good morning! Between May 17 and May 18, there were 11 new positions posted on the ACS Careers website. Of these, 2 (18%) are academically connected and 1 (9%) is from Kelly Scientific Resources.

Safety: Arkema is looking for a senior product safety specialist; B.S. in chemistry and 5 years in product safety regulation desired.

Polymers: PPG Industries is looking for a Ph.D. chemist; polymer synthesis experience, the ability to supervise a technician (?) and the ability to pass a hair sample drug test (?!?) is desired.

Burlington!: Seventh Generation is looking for a B.S. chemist to become their research manager; 5 years in product development (hopefully in home cleaning products) is desired.

A broader look: Seems I'm doing more and more of these, as the ACS Careers feed starts drying up (and the Merck ads don't roll in.) Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com and Indeed.com show (respectively) 303, 709 and 4,268 positions for the search term "chemist." USAjobs.gov shows 88 positions for the search term "chemist." 

9 comments:

  1. Some sweet med chem positions going in Boston -

    http://goo.gl/0aiMf

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  2. Funny, I'm actually sitting in the airport right now on my way to interview with PPG- 2 hr delay! >8-(
    They've had listings for photochromics people up for awhile, if anyone's interested.

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  3. Best of luck, A3:27. I'm sure you'll do fine.

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  4. Nothing beats the piece of mind provided by a canceled flight to a job interview, followed a later flight re-route through Chattanooga - which results in the luggage containing your suit getting lost. There is nothing I like better than rush shopping for interview clothes at 8 pm the night before the job talk/

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  5. Re the PPG announcement:

    In the coatings industry (where I used to work), it was not unusual to supervise a technician who would be the one to make up formulas, spray them out and then do all the paint testing. The supervising chemist may or may not do some lab work, depending on all their other responsibilities.

    I'm puzzled by your "?" in your post in regards to this. The chemical industry (thankfully) does not have all that much angst about people's job titles and backgrounds that the pharma industry has.

    BTW, the PPG announcement no longer says anything about drug testing.

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  6. A7:13a: I think my issue is: how do they measure that ability? Other than that, I don't really have an issue.

    (Thanks for the expertise on the issue, btw.)

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  7. A7:13a replying -

    What the announcement should have said is experience with supervising a technician. Well, some chemists are good at this, and some aren't. I'm not sure how to measure this, other than asking references how the person was at this. I have known experienced chemists who had good technical skills, but they were hopeless at supervising a technician - they couldn't verbally or in writing get across to the technician what the work was they wanted done.

    One of the worst cases I've observed is the chemist who wanted the technician to think for himself, and so the chemist would not give clear instructions to the technician. The technician would go and do the experiments, only to have the chemists say, 9 times out of 10, "That wasn't what I wanted!" I had to share a lab with that chemist for three years, and it was painful for me to watch this. For what it was worth, the chemist was also unable to have a intelligible technical conversation with other chemists, as well.

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  8. 7:13a: I agree with your observations, for what it's worth. -- CJ

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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