Career Development for Scientists

Forbes.com just published an article on How To Find A Job When You’ve Been Looking Forever.  Nothing you didn’t already know, but it’s nice to hear it again from a different voice.

My personal favorite part of the article?  ”If you can’t give a coherent, responsible answer to the question, ‘How can I help you,’ then you don’t have the right to ask for help” (Eileen Wolkstein, a New York career coach with more than 25 years’ experience).  Yes, networking is important, but it is crucial not to waste the other person’s time.

Lessons Learned from the ACS Meeting was just published on the ACS careers blog. (Yep, I wrote it.)   Check it out!

My friend Bill Suits writes:

Organic chemists may need to adjust their career goals.  While few jobs are found for Medicinal Chemist, literally hundreds of jobs are found under Bioanalytical Chemist. Think about your transferable skills and look for a related position where they may be used.

If you are a great reader and have been involved with patenting, passing a patent licensing test and getting a position is almost assured.

I was prompted (to comment) by your linked-in comment and two recent searches where I found one vs 400+ job listings as I prepared my job listing poster for respective meetings.

Great article was just posted at ScienceCareers.org entitled Choosing the Best Fit, that talks about how to make sure your next job will be the  right one for you, in terms of both corporate culture and personality match.  An important, but often discounted, aspect of developing your career.

Another of my articles was just published on the ACS Careers blog.  Check it out…

A Chemist by Any Other Name

Three researchers have just won the 2010 Nobel Prize for their research analyzing job markets, and how many people can be unemployed at the same time there are many job openings.  You can be sure we’ll be hearing more in the days to come, but for now check out the official announcement.

“A decision and not a failing” on ScienceCareers blog alerted me to an article in the Chronicle on Higher Education on “Advising the Dissertation Student who Won’t Finish” by Leonard Cassuto.

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The 2010 Ig Nobel Prize in Management was awarded yesterday to Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.  I have long suspected this was how some companies did it, I’m glad there is now computational proof that this is the way to go.

The research was originally published as The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study in Physica A, vol. 389, no. 3, February 2010, pp. 467-72.