Career Planning

In 1959 when I was trying to determine what I wanted to do, I dismissed being a pure mathematician, most likely a great idea since I may be good on the applied side the pure stuff can become a bore and I was ultimately not good at it. But what I did was to sit down with the Sunday NY Times and look at the job section and determined that EE and Chem E was where the action was at. It was a rational decision process. There never was a question as to "what would I like to be when I grew up", it was "where are the jobs and how do I get there".

Now I read a report in C&EN, the American Chemical Society news organ and it appears that chemists are falling off a cliff. They state:

The U.S. chemical industry lost 15,000 jobs in 2008, down 1.7% from the end of 2007. That decline, to 847,000 jobs, was almost as bad as the 1.9% decline in jobs for the overall economy, which shed 2.6 million workers. Economists expect the situation to get worse in 2009.

They continue:

Chemical employment peaked at 1.1 million jobs in 1981, and has trended downward since, Swift notes. He attributes the decline to productivity gains, outsourcing, and jobs lost to overseas competitors. The one bright spot had been the pharmaceutical industry, a statistical subset of chemicals, which saw steady job increases over the decade through the end of 2007. However, available data show that pharmaceutical makers cut about 4,700 jobs, down 1.6%, through the end of November 2008.

So from 1981 to now the jobs for chemists has dropped from 1.1 million to 840K, almost 300K jobs while the economy has been growing more than two fold despite the recent downturn. That means this is not a field one wants to enter.

Thus one wonders why anyone would go into chemistry. It is not that chemists are not valuable, they are indeed, but unlike EEs who have a strong entrepreneurial streak the chemists has gone to industry, academia or the government. What is amazing is the growing demand in biotech and especially now in informatics on biotech systems, and the lack of flow in that direction. It is not that the chemist training is out of touch, it may be more mindset rather than any competence deficiency.

The bottom line is now that students are determining what to major in, art history, social work, chemist, why not just look where the future jobs are, for today there is a wealth of information to help you, more than just the Sunday Times. I believe that this idea of doing what you want to do may be at the heart of many of our job problems. There are many in the younger generation who feel they are empowered to get a job they want, not what the economy needs or can provide. Carriage makers were put out by the auto, and auto factory workers by robots and off shore production. Nothing remains constant, one must assess the flow of the economy and then be prepared to change as it does. Creative Destruction is real, it is ongoing, and it is at the heart of a free economy. Trying to prevent it is akin to trying to hold back a broken dam with one's hands.