Pros
You get a lot of support from all of the other people that work in your department. Almost everyone has worked in every position and you are rotated around so even after you are "signed off" of training in a certain position you can always ask for help if you do not understand something or are unsure what to do. I have found that it is better to ask for help/clarification of the next step if you are unsure of yourself than to just go with what you believe to be correct and find out later that you were wrong. This will only make the department redo/reschedule the test for the patients which makes the client/hospital that ordered the test wait that much longer for an answer. Sometimes the tests are not expected to have a very fast turn around but you do get "STAT" tests that are expected to be expedited and for the client to get a response as soon as they possibly can. If you mess up on these tests it is only going to make someone else have to redo them and for the client to have less of a chance of asking this lab to do their stat testing again in the future. One last thing I like is that we are often sent "test" samples ourselves that are sent to 2 or 3 other labs and the results are compared together to see if how the labs compare. You will not know this at the time so that the samples are not treated any differently but later someone will come along and let you know that you participated in this exercise and I think that this is a good thing to do on a continual basis.
Cons
The learning curve can be quite steep for some positions and you are expected to be able to pick things up rather quickly no matter what. When you first come on board there are around 400 SOPs that you are expected to become familiar with for the testing of different drugs from different sample types along with over 200 different "lessons". This can be quite daunting but after you finish this task it is not so bad, you will have to keep up with changes to SOPs and you are expected to do 12 CE credits per year but depending on your prior knowledge, these "classes" are not that hard to do and most professional jobs have some kind of CE expectation these days anyways, even automotive repair.