Job Prospects Termed Discouraging For This Year's New Science Grads

Science Grads Author: KAREN KREEGER, pp.1 Date: June 13,1994 Career analysts suggest that the latest crop of researchers hone their skills in other areas Clasping a diploma in one hand and a resume in the other, newly minted science graduates are celebrating their achievements all over the United States this month. However, their enthusiasm may be dampened somewhat when they get down to the hard business of job hunting in the tough employment climate that placement experts say has characterized the science profession in the past several years. Career counselors are advising graduates to broaden their skills and consider employers outside the traditional research areas in academia, industry, and government in their search strategy. These placement specialists say that while there may not be many openings in U.S. labs, there are alternative career paths in which a scientific background is becoming a major benefit--in law, business, public policy, and communications, for example. "People who have multiple skills and talents are much better off than people who are narrowly focused, especially at the master's level," says Joan Burrelli, a research analyst in the department of career services at the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Washington, D.C. Experts are warning that those graduates who have their heart set on a research job do not have an easy search ahead of them. Seasoned job hunters, recruiters, and counselors all advise new graduates to start early, maintain a flexible outlook, be assertive, and diversify their skills. "I started about 10 months before I planned on graduating, sending out about 30 letters of inquiry," says Daniel Kephart, who started postdoctoral work in late January in the molecular virology and host defense group at Philadelphia-based pharmaceutical company Smith-Kline Beecham. Philip McQueen, a physicist formerly with the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., advises job hunters to "push the skills and attributes you are most proud of. Make sure prospective employers know about them." He adds that taking courses in areas outside his primary field opened him up "to new job possibilities." The need for new scientists to expand their job-search horizons is intensifying as several scientific societies report downward employment trends in their fields. For example, according to an internal report entitled "Employment Outlook for Chemists and Chemical Engineers," issued last month by ACS, the prospects for chemists worsened in 1993. Unemployment figures for experienced chemists (2 percent) and chemical engineers (3.5 percent) are the highest they have been in the last 10 years. For new graduates, the figures are much worse. ACS reports in its fall 1993 salary survey that unemployment was 19 percent for new B.S. grads (up from 10 percent in 1992), 13 percent for new M.S. grads (up from 5 percent), and 17 percent for new Ph.D. grads (up from 4 percent). Meanwhile, the American Mathematical Society, Providence, R.I., states that the 1993 unemployment figure for new math Ph.D.'s was the third highest since 1971--12.7 percent. The American Institute of Physics (AIP), College Park, Md., reports that unemployment among people who have earned their physics Ph.D.'s in the last two years is about 3.2 percent. While overall unemployment figures for scientists (about 2 percent to 4 percent) are low compared with the national average (about 6 percent to 7 percent), these statistics, especially for scientists entering the profession, can be jolting. "These are bad numbers relative to what scientists and engineers normally experience," says Burrelli, noting that, in general, current unemployment figures for science are "two to three times higher" than in the recent past. According to Robert Weatherall, director of career services at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at the Ph.D./postdoctoral level, it is "hard to keep track of the employment statistics in life sciences because postdocs [in these disciplines] are an unsurveyed group." However, the consensus among employment specialists in government, industry, academia, and professional societies is that the job outlook in the life sciences is, for the most part, flat. Although detailed, current data on employment trends are not systematically gathered for the biological sciences, the most recent statistics for employment in life and environmental sciences can be found in a National Science Foundation draft report (see accompanying table) entitled "Characteristics of Doctoral Scientists and Engineers in the United States: 1991." Another report--prepared by the Rockville, Md.-based consulting firm Westat Inc. for the American Society for Microbiology (ASM)--summarizes the views of employers, educators, and funders in the microbiological sciences about their discipline's employment and training needs, expressed at six ASM-sponsored focus-group meetings. These sessions, conducted between November 1993 and January 1994, were held to explore the need for and feasibility of conducting a nationwide survey on education and job-related issues in microbiology. In the ASM report, some industry participants in the focus groups are quoted as saying that a "volatile and uncertain job market faces the profession today." However, they note that there is a shortage of specialists in fermentation and microbial physiology, especially at the doctoral level. Regarding the situation in academia, university officials state in the ASM report that a bachelor's or master's degree in microbiology is more marketable than a general biology degree. They also say that new Ph.D.'s entering the job market will find their prospects worse than those with B.S. or M.S. degrees and that there does not appear to be a growing need for more university faculty in microbiology in the near future. Mary Alice Yund, a biotechnology consultant based in Berkeley, Calif., paints a very similar picture for the biotechnology industry in the San Francisco Bay area. "The overall outlook is not that rosy," says Yund. However, she says, some companies are hiring more and job seekers must do their homework to know where to target their efforts. "Smaller companies don't get as many c.v.'s as the larger companies," she says, so they are a good place to key in on. Yund also advises that, because there is such a diversity of biotechnology companies to apply to, job hunters should carefully match their skills with prospective companies. Yund and colleague Ellen M. Martin--communications director at DNA Plant Technology, Oakland, Calif.--run a weekly lunchtime seminar for job seekers held at the Bay Area Bioscience Center, a public-information organization. In their work there, Martin says, they recently have seen many life scientists recruited into law. "If you can stand the long educational road, it's a dynamite combination," Martin says. Yund and Martin's advice to people looking for alternatives is to combine a science background with training in business, finance, accounting, law, or communications. Also commenting on alternative career paths for life scientists, Melanie Graper, director of worldwide employment for research and development at SmithKline Beecham, says, "Patent attorneys are one of the hottest fields for employment. We are looking for people with a B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in life science and a law degree." Other high-demand combination fields in industry, according to Graper, are bioinformatics, pharmacoeconomics, and bio- statistics. Graper says that SmithKline is "hiring approximately the same number of people this year compared to last year," although she declines to give exact numbers. She also mentions that the general life sciences disciplines of molecular biology, pathology, immunology, and pharmacokinetics are fields in demand at present. In government laboratories, some observers cited in the ASM report noted, there is a need for broadly experienced clinical microbiologists at the Ph.D. level and people with more hands-on experience at the M.S./B.S. level. Michael Fordis, director of the Office of Education at the National Institutes of Health, says that although NIH is in the midst of a hiring freeze, this does not necessarily limit the number of postdoctoral fellows that the institutes will take on in the next year. "The NIH still has major opportunities for postdocs," he says. "We've instituted a new tenure-track program and anticipate that postdoctoral training positions will continue to be strongly supported. It's important for people to understand that these positions are limited by budgetary constraints and programmatic needs rather than a ceiling on positions." ACS's Burrelli says the job market this year for chemists, compared with the recent past, is "still poor" and that it has "probably bottomed out." According to the May ACS internal report, opportunities are higher in pharmaceutical companies, analytical service labs, contract research firms, and environmental labs. Burrelli adds that "increasingly there is more employment for chemists in small or medium-sized firms rather than large firms." SmithKline Beecham's Graper adds that synthetic and organic chemists are in high demand at her company. Hiring is down in industrial sectors such as agricultural chemicals, coatings, electronics, plastics, and petrochemicals, as well as in academia and in government, according to the ACS report. But Burrelli views the environmental field as one that "will continue to grow." Chemical-industry recruiters are looking for people who are familiar with government regulations on laboratory practices and environmental clean-up, says Michael Aschner, an associate professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Albany Medical College in New York and chairman of the placement committee for the Society of Toxicology's 1994 annual meeting. In general, ACS officials say, recruiters need people with flexibility and good interpersonal skills as well as technical breadth and depth. Burrelli also says that having a degree or experience in such areas as information science, computing, or law-- especially patent law--is beneficial. Marketing and sales experience, especially for people now at the B.S. and M.S. levels, is important, says Burrelli, who predicts that this will be a "big area later." Edwin Goldin, manager of the career planning and placement division at AIP, says--citing AIP 1992 studies--that almost 60 percent of the new Ph.D.'s surveyed took postdoctoral fellowships. "Now that's astounding in itself because a decade ago only 40 percent took postdocs," says Goldin. He says the 1992 data show that academia gets the "lion's share" of money for postdocs and these have been slightly increasing "to take up the slack" in decreasing permanent positions. And, although industry and government research facilities usually have fewer postdoctoral positions to offer, he says that there is "perhaps a slight increase in [industry] postdocs." His overall view is that the situation is negative on the permanent employment side. The 1992 numbers, says Goldin, "are about as low as they go," and he expects the 1993 and 1994 figures to be much the same. Looking toward the future, he says that AIP, in addition to tracking traditional career paths, is beginning to amass much information on alternative careers for physicists. "I have a backlog of information about physicists moving into a number of areas that could be challenging and exciting," says Goldin. These are areas, says Goldin, that must "match the analytical lust a physicist has." For example, he says, large, multidimensional problems in environmental sciences such as designing transportation systems may be new fields for physicists to move into. Other topics he targets as growth areas are biophysics, computer hardware and software development, and information tech- nology. He advises all job seekers that "the more diverse they can make themselves, and the more they can combine interests and areas in their own education, the broader their options will be." (Percentages of scientists who received their doctorates in 1991) *Underemployed doctoral scientists are those who reported that they were either (1) holding part-time positions when they would have preferred working full time, or (2) working in nonscience occupations when they would have preferred science jobs. Source: Characteristics of Doctoral Scientists and Engineers in the United States: 1991, Science Resources Studies Division, National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C., forthcoming. Degree FieldEmployed in ScienceUnemployedUnderemployed* All Sciences 89.01.51.8 Physical Sciences 91.92.01.0 Mathematics 92.40.3 0.8 Computer Sciences95.31.40.3 Environmental Sciences94.11.11.9 Life Sciences92.61.71.6 Psychology90.31.21.0 Social Sciences75.71.43.5

Job Prospects Termed Discouraging For This Year's New Science Grads

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of