Chemical & Engineering News,
October 23, 1995

Copyright © 1995 by the American Chemical Society.

Mairin B. Brennan,

C&EN Washington

Chemical engineers graduating this spring can expect to move quickly into full-time employment. Chemists with bachelor's and master's degrees, especially those who explore opportunities at small companies, can expect to land a position in fairly short order. Newly minted Ph.D. chemists, however, will continue to find the going tough.

The pool of postdoctoral fellows - which burgeoned in 1994 to 4,115 postdocs in chemistry at Ph.D.-granting institutions in the U.S., according to data from the 1995 ACS Directory of Graduate Research - will ensure fierce competition for doctoral-level positions, whether in industry or academia. And there is "no way of knowing how many industrial postdocs are out there," says Ted J. Logan, manager of technical recruiting at Procter & Gamble.

Another thorn in the collective side of Ph.D.s is that the bulge in retirement in academia is not quite here yet. "People in their fifties constitute a very large fraction" of the academic population, says Philip J. Stephens, chairman of the department of chemistry at the University of Southern California. "There will be a lot of academic jobs in the next 10 to 20 years," he notes. "It's preprogrammed by biology." Meanwhile, the academic situation is very constrained, he says, the number of students who want to go into academia has shrunk, and "that's very discouraging," because universities could lose "the cream of the younger generation's intellectual crop."

So what's a new Ph.D. to do? Many will have to brace themselves for an intensive job search and scour the market to turn up positions. Many small companies hire Ph.D.s, but "college placement offices don't know how to connect with the smaller companies," says James D. Burke, manager of research recruiting and university relations at Rohm and Haas. "Grad students need to invent their own process for finding these employers," he says, citing two benefits that can result. One is that Ph.D.s find out a job search can work. The other is that they will be much more confident doing another search if the need arises, "unlike people of my generation who were confronted with layoffs," he explains.

And Ph.D.s need to broaden their horizons. Duward F. Shriver, a professor of chemistry at Northwestern University, says he knows Ph.D.s who have accepted positions at junior colleges. "They were delighted with it," he says. "They hadn't considered doing this before and all of a sudden they thrived."

"Like undergraduates who don't make it into med school, it takes [Ph.D.s] a while to get their heads changed to begin to look at other options" if they do not get a job immediately after they graduate, says Rebecca J. Simon, placement director for the school of chemical sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. "There's an ego involvement," she explains. "There's going to have to be a major change in how Ph.D.s think about the employment market. ... People are saying the jobs are with the small and medium-sized [companies], except trying to identify them is a bit of a trick." Simon believes demand for B.S. and M.S. chemists this year "will probably be okay," perhaps a bit better than last year. But she is "seeing only a limited number of positions in industry" for Ph.D.s.

There are hints that the market for Ph.D. chemists may be on the mend. "In general, the market is a bit looser," says Joel Shulman, manager of doctoral recruiting at Procter & Gamble. "I think we've hit the bottom for Ph.D. chemists," he says, "but I think the slope coming out of that bottom is going to be fairly shallow." He thinks it is unlikely that hiring will ever again approach what it was in the late 1980s.

"I've heard stories of pent-up demand," says Rohm and Haas's Burke. Chemical companies "are all having fine years, and fine years are encouraging, [because] they enable people to plan for the future and include recruiting and hiring." Most chemical companies will be hiring, he says, and some will be hiring "ambitiously." He predicts demand for Ph.D. chemists will be up 20 - 25% over last year, but cautions that this increase is over "a very low baseline."

Last year was quite a discouraging year, he explains. He believes the market for bachelor's and master's-level chemists will be relatively robust - and the key word is "relatively." The past few years have been some of the tightest in the past two decades in terms of jobs. So by comparison, 1996 is shaping up to be much more encouraging. B.S. and M.S. chemists "seem to be doing well in smaller companies and ... in some of the pharmaceutical companies" as support staff, he says. Still, the numbers of new graduates at all degree levels run in the thousands, and it is likely that the supply will exceed the demand.

Rohm and Haas will be recruiting on campuses for Ph.D.s, says Burke, unlike last year when the company's needs did not justify recruiting and Ph.D.s were hired through networking with faculty members. "We'll clearly be hiring more chemical engineers and mechanical engineers from campus than last year," he notes. After going through a reorganization, the company "is going ahead with a fairly full campus recruiting program," he says.

P&G will be looking to hire Ph.D.s in a broad range of disciplines, says Shulman, although the company will be recruiting fewer doctoral-level candidates than it has for the past couple of years, when it was hiring Ph.D.s at a fast clip. Recruiting for M.S. chemists also will be down a bit this year at P&G, but will remain "real strong" for B.S. chemists, says Shulman. "We hired a huge number of B.S. chemists last year, probably the most we ever hired. ... I think demand is still pretty high there. I think good bachelor's-level chemists are going to have a lot of possibilities."

Donald E. Gatewood, manager of recruitment and college relations at Union Carbide, also predicts Ph.D. hiring will be up from last year, which, he, too, says "wasn't a great year." Not all companies will increase hiring, but the overall numbers will be up, he says. Carbide's recruiting will be up slightly from last year, when the company hired 22 Ph.D.s (a mix of chemists and chemical engineers) and 44 B.S. and M.S. chemists. Half of the non-Ph.D. hires came through the company's student employment program, says Gatewood.

Postdoctoral fellowships in chemistry top 4,000 in 1994.

Dow Chemical, DuPont, Air Products, and Eastman Chemical are among other big chemical companies set to recruit on campus this year. Dow has a number of openings for Ph.D.s in chemistry and chemical engineering, says company spokeswoman Catherine C. Maxey, but the company will focus its campus recruiting on B.S. and M.S. chemists and chemical engineers. Roughly three-fourths of Dow's 125 new technical hires will be chemical engineers, she says.

DuPont is evaluating its hiring needs, "which current information suggests will be similar to last year," says Ph.D. staffing coordinator Robert L. Siegel. The company hired 300 people last year, he says, 80 to 85% of them technical hires, including 40 to 60 Ph.D.s. "Most of our needs are for engineers and computer scientists," Siegel says. At the bachelor's level, hiring tends to be heavily weighted toward engineers, he says.

Eastman Chemical is "looking for [B.S.] chemical engineers for research and development, design, manufacturing, technical service, and technical sales," says personnel representative Gary J. Kerr. The company also will be recruiting for Ph.D.s in analytical chemistry and polymer science and "a few Ph.D.s" in chemical engineering and organic chemistry, he says. But Eastman will not be recruiting on campuses for B.S. or M.S. chemists, he notes.

Air Products will be recruiting "high-caliber students who show leadership and strong teamwork abilities [and have] technical expertise" for the company's career development program (CDP), says Pamela S. Handwerk, manager of university relations. "We consider CDP a feeder mechanism toward our future technical, commercial, and financial leadership," she explains. This year, the company is looking to hire between 23 and 28 B.S.- and M.S.-level chemical engineers, roughly 10 Ph.D. chemical engineers, and probably three Ph.D. physical chemists for the CDP program. Air Products will not be recruiting B.S. chemists on campus, says Handwerk.

Phillips Petroleum will continue the modest recruiting it resumed last year after a three year period of essentially no hiring, says David Blakemore, manager of employment and college relations. The company will concentrate on a few schools, he says, and, like last year, the bulk of its hiring will be for chemical, mechanical, and petroleum engineers; geoscientists; and "maybe one or two polymer chemists."

Pharmaceutical companies that have downsized are beginning to crack open their Ph.D.-hiring doors, though the picture may be different for firms that underwent mergers this year (C&EN, Oct. 16, page 10). "Most pharmaceutical companies have realized that the ... only viable strategy to long-term sustained success is innovation, and you have to get that through hiring top-quality scientists," says Alan J. Main, senior vice president of research at Ciba Pharmaceutical. Drug firms such as Ciba have rid themselves of inefficient bureaucracy and are investing more money in innovation, he explains.

Ciba is recruiting as aggressively as it ever did, he says. "We're looking for a lot of molecular biologists," but also for medicinal chemists, organic chemists, and "people with expertise in computer modeling, X-ray crystallography, and physical chemistry." He believes "the whole combinatorial chemistry approach has refueled a renaissance in the role of chemists in corporations." There seems to be a strong emphasis on chemistry as one of the critical skills pharmaceutical firms need to have, he points out.

Pharmacopeia, a Princeton, N.J.-based drug discovery firm with about 100 employees, will be recruiting Ph.D. chemists for solid-phase synthesis, says President and Chief Scientific Officer John C. Chabala. "It's synthetic organic chemistry in a broad sense, but it's done on resins," he explains. "It's a really new field and there are very few people who have done this kind of work." So the company "by and large" will recruit new Ph.D. chemists and train them "much the same way the pharmaceutical companies have hired organic chemists and taught them the medicinal chemistry they need," he says.

C&EN's help-wanted ads give no clear sign of hiring recovery.

David M. Floyd, vice president of discovery chemistry at Bristol-Myers Squibb, believes all pharmaceutical companies will be incorporating combinatorial chemistry and automated synthesis into their drug discovery efforts. The skill base will be synthetic organic chemistry - at all degree levels - he says. "Synthetic [organic] chemistry remains a very critical backdrop for most of the [chemistry] positions the pharmaceutical industries will be hiring for," he notes.

Biotech companies also are adding combinatorial chemistry and medicinal chemistry to their research repertoire. Amgen's Boulder, Colo., facility, which has always done peptide and nucleic acid chemistry, is already expanding into the two new areas, says Vice President for Research Michael P. Bevilacqua. Amgen expects to be actively recruiting for Ph.D. synthetic organic chemists and also for M.S. and B.S. bench chemists, he says. The company acquired the biotech firm Synergen last year, says Bevilacqua, which contributed to its rapid expansion. Amgen's Thousand Oaks, Calif., facility also will be expanding its chemistry programs over the next year, he says.

Large biotechnology firms continue to add to their staff and small and medium-sized firms are a hidden source of jobs. Genentech, which currently has 2,750 employees - 14% with Ph.D.s and 66% with B.A. or B.S. degrees - "will be hiring on an as-needed basis," says Kathleen Rinehart, manager of corporate communications. Areas the company tends to be hiring in, she says, include development, process science, and manufacturing.

At Gilead Sciences Inc., a biotechnology/drug discovery company in Foster City, Calif., "things are going well," says Linda A. Fitzpatrick, vice president of human resources and corporate communications. The company, which has just filed its first new drug application, expects to add between 50 and 100 more positions this year to its current 200. About 30% will be in R&D, says Fitzpatrick, and the rest in sales and marketing. Gilead will be hiring Ph.D.s in both chemistry and the biological sciences as well as M.D.s and people with bachelor's degrees in chemistry and biology, she says.

Many biotech firms are pharmaceutical in nature, says Catherine Connor, director of placement for the biotechnology center at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. "So they will be hiring synthetic organic chemists and analytical chemists," she says, as well as people with advanced degrees in biology, biochemistry, agricultural science, and the like, whom she helps to place. "My students are not lacking for a place to find a good position," she says. But small and medium-sized companies are so widely scattered that students have to do a lot of searching, she points out. "Our database of biotechnology companies [lists] over 1,800," says Connor, "and I'm sure we don't have them all." The Institute for Biotechnology Information, Research Triangle Park, N.C., lists 1,250 biotech firms; New York City-based accounting firm Ernst & Young says there are 1,308. By whatever count, there are more than enough to make a job search worthwhile.

A nationwide web of labs offers analytical or consulting services, and many of them have benefited from outsourcing of work by pharmaceutical firms wanting to streamline their operations. "It's much nicer to talk [about hiring trends] now than it was two years ago," says Robert B. Harris, president of Harris Laboratories, Lincoln, Neb., a soil testing and pharmaceutical research lab. "Then it was blind optimism" as opposed to solid optimism today, he says. The company of just under 500 employees is expanding in the pharmaceutical area and will be hiring in that area. It recently brought on board a senior analytical chemist, Harris says.

"I think we have 10 openings for chemists and pharmaceutical microbiologists right now," says Carol D. Hess, executive vice president for Lancaster Laboratories, Lancaster, Pa., a firm with 500 employees that does analytical and method development work for environmental, pharmaceutical, and food industries. Hess also is director of human resources for Thermo Analytical Inc., the Lancaster-based network of seven labs that includes Lancaster Labs. At Lancaster "we're trying to grow as fast as we can [in pharmaceuticals] while maintaining the quality of our work," she says. "We do outplacement with pharmaceutical companies. If they are laying off people, we try to hire them." She says the environmental area currently is not a high-growth area for companies that depended on government contract work. "Lancaster has always focused on the commercial market," she notes, "so for us [the workload] is not shifting."

"We're always recruiting ... for analytical chemists," says Joseph K. Goebels, director of human resources for Pharmokinetics Laboratories, a Baltimore-based firm of 150 employees that does biopharmaceutical analysis. Although Pharmokinetics hires mostly B.S. and M.S. chemists, he says, it also hires Ph.D.s with experience in methods development.

Some small bioremediation companies also hire chemists, although they are more likely to be looking for chemical engineers. Inland Consultants/Inland Environmental in Skokie, Ill., which specializes in bioremediation of chlorinated solvents, will sign on two bench chemists this year, says managing agent James G. Frycek. The 24-person company "likes to hire aggressive young people...who are willing to learn," he says.

Another bioremediation company, Envirogen, in Lawrenceville, N.J., is growing at 30 to 40% a year, according to Ronald Unterman, vice president of technology development. "It's a small company [90 people], so it's easy to grow," he says. Envirogen probably will hire one or two chemists and one or two chemical engineers this year, he notes. Its field staff is heavily weighted toward engineers, and most of its R&D group are microbiologists, he explains.

Academic hiring

In academia, "it seems like places are stabilizing and positions really exist" says Kendall N. Houk, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. The department, which lost a couple of senior faculty to an early retirement incentive in the early 1990s, plans to hire two people per year for the foreseeable future, some at the senior level. "This is the first year we've been making senior-level offers," he says. "We've been broke until recently."

A spot check of universities around the country bore out Houk's assessment of academic hiring. Chemistry departments contacted by C&EN were hoping to fill from a low of one to a high of five positions in the coming year. Many of the slots were created by attrition or retirement, but some departments are trying to get the number of faculty positions up to what they were a decade ago. All the departments are planning to be recruiting more new faculty next year.

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