Lab tech or Chemist?

[chemwipe]

Question for everyone here:

What is your definition of a lab tech vs. that of a chemist?

It really irks me when people refer to me as a lab tech, which to me sounds entry level.

I started doing bench work in 94, and have been doing instrumentation (GC) since 2005.

Case in point: When I was laid off and looking for a job doing GC work, I got a LOT of calls for lab tech positions: "You'd be in charge of complicated scientific equipment doing tests like pH and titrations."

Something online said the difference between the two is chemists have PhDs and lab techs don't.

Weigh in, please. I'd love to hear some feedback.

Thanks,
John

[chromatographer1]

Different labs/businesses can have different definitions.

Here are mine:

A chemist is a person with a degree in chemistry.

A lab tech is someone who may have training in lab work or with electronics, who has been trained in a non academic environment to perform laboratory work, especially with the maintenance of lab equipment.

A chemist may learn to be a good lab tech, and a lab tech isn't expected to have the knowledge to perform the tasks of a chemist which may center around the purpose, the design, or the meaning of the results of lab work performed by a chemist or a lab tech.

A degree in chemistry did not qualify me to be a lab tech, but years of training in a lab did get me closer to that goal.

Being able to fix electronics and do maintenance on equipment does not qualify anyone to understand and to utilize the chemical properties of the materials being tested in a laboratory.

So both are honorable professions, and there may be a lot of overlap in job tasks. More is expected from chemists, and they often receive a higher compensation.

best wishes,

Rod

[KM-USA]

A tech performs written procedures.

A chemist develops and sometimes validates such procedures. And can do troubleshooting, both in-lab and for manufacturing.

The best lab chemists I've come across have been non-PhD in my 30+ years of working.

[JGK]

I'm from the UK and there, if you say you're a chemist, most people assume you work in a pharmacy.

Definition of chemist
noun

1. US & British An expert in chemistry; a person engaged in chemical research or experiments.

2. British a drugstore.
A pharmacist.

[chromatographer1]

Since Chemwipe is in the US (the great state of Ohio) I used the US definition.

Your points are correct and perhaps are unknown to those outside of the UK.

The point posted that a tech follows directions and chemist writes the directions is notable.

Having an advanced degree doesn't make for a good chemist or a lab tech, per se.

And being a capable lab tech doesn't imply you have any idea WHY you are doing what you are doing, but that you CAN do what you are doing.

best wishes,

Rod

[Peter Apps]

In some organisations "chemist" is reserved for those lofty beings who do synthesis. The lowly creatures who identify and quantify the components of things are referred to as "analysts", or "just analysts". This is not a world view that I have any sympathy with I should note. Similarly "technician" has connotations of mere manual labour while "researcher", "chemist", etc have an air of refined intellectual activity free of the constraints of grubby commercialism. This sort of snobbery has roots that are both deep and widespread.

I suspect that chemwipe's getting offers for base level technical jobs which are below his experience level simply reflects the pyramid of job skills - there are way more jobs at lower skill levels than at high skill levels. And although to chemwipe (and most of this forums members) a pH reading is a pretty straightforward operation, a lab manager I knew had so many problems trying to get the technicians to do pH properly and consistently that in the end she changed jobs.

Peter

[lmh]

A friend of mine was out of work a few years ago, and got pushed into interviews for some science posts that were a bit unlike his past. One asked him if he'd feel OK about using a microscope if given appropriate training. They wanted him to use a simple binocular dissecting microscope to examine samples at x10, and were a bit nonplussed when he asked "SEM or TEM?"

I like chromatographer1's answer.

I also appreciate the statement that a chemist can become a good lab tech. I don't for a moment support the either the view that technicians are gormless automata with no braincells, or view that education gets in the way of being a good technician, and that somehow people with PhDs are to be looked down on as airy-fairy theoreticians who can't hold a pipette straight. There are undoubtedly examples in both categories, but there are also loads of technicians with substantial background knowledge, and plenty of people with doctorates who are actually vaguely useful in the lab (although when your boss puts a labcoat on it's often time to take a holiday...).

In a sense, job-titles are a necessary evil. Each post is individual, and each person is individual, and it'd be great if recruitment didn't focus on mere names.

As an example of the harm done by ill-thought titles, some years ago an organisation I worked for decided to categorise a group of people into "innovative" and "non-innovative". There was a fundamentally useful background, but you can imagine how the non-innovatives felt, and what it did to the motivation of some of them.

[DR]

I like Rod's answers but will offer a little more.

I entertain the ideas of chemists and hope that they bear fruit.
I trust that these ideas have borne fruit only after I've seen good results from the techs.

-or-

A chemist should be first to explain how/why a dirty ion source fouled your MS data. A tech should be first to recognize that something was amiss with the MS.

[paulw]

Sometimes it is just a matter of terminology. I've seen companies that used both terms to describe the same position. I did work for a bit at one company where every analyst in the lab had the job title of chemist. The requirements for having a job in the lab were a degree in science. This led to a lot of biologists having a job title of chemist. Inevitably the chemist snobs deemed themselves 'real chemists'. I tell that story mostly tongue-in-cheek, but it came to a head when two relatively new individuals ended up working together on an off shift. One had a chemistry degree, the other had a biology degree. The chemist took it upon himself to treat the biologist as a second class citizen because of the degree difference. Two weeks later, everyone had the new job title of "Analyst".

I agree with others who have said that chromatographer1 had the best definitions. I know that I separate the two in my mind. If I need someone to run pH, viscosity, even follow written work instructions for GC and HPLC assays then I look for a lab technician. I think of a chemist as someone who can do in-depth troubleshooting or investigation as well as potentially do method development.

[Peter Apps]

I doubt that there can be a clear separation between "technicians" and "chemists / researchers / innovators". At one end of the spectrum are people who can do repetitive, routine operations hour after hour, day after day without going insane with boredom, and who dislike variety or new challenges. At the other end are those who get bored on the second or third repetition, lose concentration, and think up three ways of doing it better while messing up the next three samples, they have an understanding of the underlying principles and an innovative mindset that motivate them and enable them to develop new and better ways of doing things.

In all fields the repetitive, routine end of the spectrum is the one that is most easily mechanised and automated. This has dramatically reduced the requirement for "technicians" to have the special "finger skills" that used to be their stock in trade - the same thing has happened in manufacturing and construction; the autopipette is the nail gun of the analytical lab.

Although, in a manager's perfect world you can have clear dividing lines between the skills requirements for different jobs; so the routine technicians will faithfully follow procedures written by Ph D chemists to generate results for the drug researchers, in practise this does not work unless there is quite a lot of overlap in understanding. To write a good SOP for technicians to follow, the PhD chemist needs to understand the constraints of routine operations and routine operators - it is no use expecting people whose strengths are in repetitive routine to be making conditional judgements at multiple steps in a procedure. At the same time, if you have a few hundred samples, don't expect a bored PhD to generate such repeatable data as a routine technician. Ideally, as a technique works its way from development lab to production plant it needs to pass through the hands and brains of technicians who understand the chemistry of the analysis.

People get unhappy when they are bored by routine work, but don't have the method developer's innovative mindset. Or when they are always wanting new challenges but get frustrated because they have to lay the routine groundwork of first phase method validation.

Peter

[James_Ball]

I can definitely agree there Peter. I had a great technician here in the past who worked best if he did one thing only all day every day. Would have drove me crazy but he loved it. I really can't imagine how he managed to do BOD tests every day for years, and we do hundreds of them per week.

Here the biggest difference between technician and chemist is one is hourly and one is salary. Chemist are the ones stuck working the weekends

I remember when looking for my first job, I was in graduate school working on an MS in Chemistry and every time I interviewed the first words out of the interviewer's mouth were"So you want to be in management". They all assumed that if I was working on a MS I wanted to be management not a bench chemist. I ended up not finishing my thesis just to have a better chance at getting the job I wanted. I started as a lab tech then moved up to the chemist position. The best chemist managers are usually the chemist that worked their way up from the bottom.

[Peter Apps]

Hi James

You have identified another serious problem with career progression for both "technicians" and "chemists" - the managers who run things cannot conceive of anyone not wanting to be managers like them. All of the career development "initiatives" that were part of "transformation" in one place that I worked at were aimed at turning people into managers. not into better technicians and scientists (who would have been a lot more useful than more managers !!). It got so bad that at one stage bench staff who expressed no desire to get into management were offered counselling to help them get over their emotional problems !

Personnel planning went along the lines of "promoting" the most competent bench staff to management where they spent all their time supervising and correcting the efforts of the people hired to replace them at the bench. Total gain in productivity; zero at best.

I spent a lot of time advocating for career paths that left good scientists and technicians in the labs. One problem that I ran into was that during job evaluations (on the Hays system) if a scientific task was simplified to the point that HR could understand it, it sounded about as challenging as being a filing clerk. The solution was to have lab staff evaluate their own jobs (not their own performance) on the basis that the Hays system is easier to understand than science. For example, on the Hays system a job gets points for how many people report to the job holder - for lab staff we substituted instruments for people, so a lab job that involved running a GC, a GC-MS and an HPLC scored the same as an admin job supervising three people. It worked remarkably well, the points allocated by different people to each job level were consistent, and the steps between jobs at different levels in the lab were consistent with the steps between different levels of admin and management.

Which just goes to show that lab people have more brains than admin and management !

Peter

[James_Ball]

Peter,

Good idea there!

Not sure where I would rate with all the instruments I am quasi responsible for around here

It is good to know a lot about your work, but the more you know, the less vacations you get to take.

[MichaelVW]

Just to add one more story - I work for a company that treats and disposes of hazardous waste, so the lab is important, but kind of a sideshow from a company wide perspective, so I don't think anybody cares what we call ourselves.

Here, all the entry level hires into the lab are "Chemists" - but they start out doing basic bench work and then learn from there. Science takes a back seat to safety and regulatory requirements. No one wants to go to jail.

We have had a "Lab Tech" before. They washed dishes, stocked those pipette tip boxes, preped reagents, and basically made everyone's life amazingly better. Division of labor is awesome! After six months to a year Lab Techs tend to move up to Chemist if they do well, and a former Lab Tech is now our manager.

[Peter Apps]

We have had a "Lab Tech" before. They washed dishes, stocked those pipette tip boxes, preped reagents, and basically made everyone's life amazingly better. Division of labor is awesome! After six months to a year Lab Techs tend to move up to Chemist if they do well, and a former Lab Tech is now our manager.

Which is as it should be ! It also raises another point - the "routine" stuff done by the foot soldiers is nearly always just as critical to overall performance ans the fancy stuff done by the chiefs - what happens to results when glassware hasn't been cleaned properly ?

Peter