Skip to main content

Looking for an expert in isotope ratio determination? Try the Job Centre.

The people at Job Centre Plus take a full page ad in my local rag showing the range of vacancies they have on offer. Amid the kind of opportunities you'd expect - for Care Workers, Drivers and the odd Butcher's Assistant - one job stands out from the crowd. To apply for the advertised Science Leader Inorganic & IRMS role, all that's required is a PhD in a 'relevant scientific field', knowledge of high accuracy quantification and a passing familiarity with laser ablation.

I'm not sure which amazes me more: the idea of the employer thinking they'll find their mass spectrometrist down at the local labour exchange or the civil servants finding it appropriate to promote the vacancy. Even if we accept there are a number of middle-class professionals who have lost their jobs in the recession and that the Job Centre probably wants to demonstrate it doesn't just deal in cooks and bottle-washers, I think it's safe to say that the number of locals fitting the Science Leader profile will be a little on the low side. In fact, if anyone does have the necessary qualifications locally, they'll already be working for the employer that's advertising.

Eventually, I suspect, the scientists may be forced to take radical measures. Like paying for an ad in a scientific publication or maybe listing their job on a website read by spectrometrists looking for work. In the meantime, I can only imagine the conversations:

"Yes, Mr Jones, I can see from your application that you're very interested in isotope ratio determination. But how exactly did your career in retail management prepare you for it?"

Comments

  1. defnitly a diffrent job best job i ever seen advertised was a phycic but you had to have expirence what a shame real jobs do better

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.

When one name isn't enough

You may have heard the news reports about the turmoil in Kingston, Jamaica, resulting from the government's attempts to pin down a notorious drug lord on behalf of the US. I was struck by the number of self-styled monikers this guy has given himself. He is, depending on the channel you listen to, known on the street as 'Dudas', 'The Big Man' and 'The President' - worshipped by many impoverished Kingston residents as a benefactor to slum dwellers. It's his real name that seems most appropriate, however. If you were a drug baron called Christopher Coke, wouldn't you leave it at that? It's certainly not a name to be sniffed at.