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The outlook has been significantly affected by
sharp rises in the price of petroleum products that have sent
feedstock, material and transportation costs off the charts, mainly
due to a record-breaking hurricane season that has battered refineries
in the Gulf Coast region, C&EN notes. It’s still early in the
hiring season, which coincides with the academic year, and the picture
could change if the industry recovers more rapidly than expected from
the disasters, according to the newsmagazine.
The magazine, in preparing the special section,
looked at the annual ACS Salary Survey, ACS New Graduate Survey, job
placement efforts, employer demand for adding employees, and
unemployment trends. C&EN concluded that all indicators point
to continuing difficulties for chemists looking for fulltime jobs.
Quoting from the ACS New Graduate Survey, the
newsmagazine reports that as of October 2004 median starting salaries
for chemists who graduated during the 2003-2004 academic year were
$32,500 for bachelor’s level chemists, $43,600 for master’s graduates
and $65,000 for Ph.D. chemists. These compare to starting salaries of
$32,000, $44,500, and $63,300 for graduates with the same degrees in
October 2003. The median is the point at which half of the salaries
are above a certain point and half are below that point.
Meanwhile, chemists responding to the more
comprehensive ACS Salary Survey, who had not changed jobs in the
previous year and who reported their salaries as of March 2004 and
March 2005, posted a median gain of 5 percent, from $80,000 to
$84,000. This followed a gain of 4.3 percent in the previous year.
Unemployment among workforce ACS members was down
to 3.1 percent in March 2005 from a record high of 3.6 percent a year
earlier. This compares with a U.S. national unemployment figure of 5.1
percent. |
