Career management for chemists : a guide to success in a chemistry career

John Fetzer's "Career Management for Chemists" provides ample, common-sense guidance on the key topics such as:

Resumés and CVs, Staying Driven & Current, Personal Skills & Traits

Networking, Teamwork & Leadership, Speaking & Listening

Writing Research Papers, Mentoring, Behavior & Rewards

The practical coverage reflects not only his long professional experience but also his insight that, especially in today's changing workplace, expectations and strategies for career management require constant re-evaluation.

Provides real, common-sense, and proven means to enrich and make more rewarding a technical career.

Pre-publication comments from colleagues -

"Not only the student who is taking his first steps in the scientific world would profit abundantly by mining this book for views and ideas on the different sides of his chosen career. Also the seasoned scientist will be stimulated to scrutinize his own habits and pick up new thoughts, thereby becoming a more skilled instructor of his younger colleagues." J. Andersson, University of Münster, Germany

"As one of the international collaborators of Dr. John Fetzer, I want to warmly congratulate him. His efforts nicely summarize very important topics for all who work in scientific activities. But, at the same time, Career Management for Chemists also provides some real insights for many people who are not working in science. This is a nice guidebook on how to enrich our lives and help us to become more successful!!

K. Jinno, Toyohashi University of Technology

• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction - The career as a long trip
• 2 Technical Areas
• 2.1 Accepting Failure to Create Innovation in Experimentation
• 2.2 Keeping current - always learning
• 2.3 Specialist or Generalist?
• 2.4 Being a Part of the Scientific Community
• 2.4.1 General Remarks
• 2.4.2 Societies - Is it advantageous to belong to professional societies
• 2.4.3 Being Involved in Societies
• 2.4.4 Conferences - Is it advantageous to attend and present at conferences?
• 2.4.5 Journals and other Publications - Is it advantageous to publish papers?
• 2.4.6 Reviewing for Journals
• 2.4.7 Advisory Boards and Editorships
• 2.5 Thinking - Curiosity and Wonder
• 2.6 Thinking - Scepticism
• 2.7 Diversifying
• 2.8 Parochial science - Possessiveness and Boundaries
• 2.9 The Tools (Part 1) - Tools and mechanics of research: Putting together your toolbox
• 2.10 The Tools (Part 2) - Handy tools, but not always needed
• 3 Non-technical Areas
• 3.1 Communicating
• 3.1.1 The general common points
• 3.1.2 Eloquence - Speaking Easily the First time
• 3.1.3 Writing a paper - The basic mechanics help
• 3.1.5 Listening
• 3.2 Networking - Becoming an integral part of your field
• 3.3 Collaborative Research
• 3.4 Diversity in Science - Being open minded
• 2.5 Using a mentor - Help Wanted: Sage and Wise Chemists to help guide
• 3.6 Being a mentor
• 3.7 Behaviours
• 3.7.1 Personalities and Styles in Dealing with Others
• 3.7.2 Dealing with Those on the Dark Side - difficult and worse people
• 3.7.3 Ethics - The Right Things to Do
• 3.8 Teams, Teamwork and Leadership
• 3.9 Balancing professional and private time
• 4 Career Changes
• 4.1 The Rewards or working in industry - Starting and choosing a direction from graduate school to an industrial career
• 4.2 Industry versus academia - The Merits of an Industrial Career in Contacts to one in Academia
• 4.3 Resume and curriculum vita - Getting the message across
• 4.4 The grass is greener - A Comparison Between Workplaces
• 4.5 Changing hats - supervising and managing
• 4.6 Personal skills and assessments
• 4.7 Degree of difficulty - non-advanced degree chemists
• 4.8 Pursuit of Non-traditional Careers in Chemistry
• 5 Bibliography