Pros
People in the lab are friendly. You can get working experience in the biotech industry.
Cons
Workload- Initially you will wait to be trained in something worthwhile for a minimum of 6 weeks. Immediately following limited, irregular and poorly organised training, you will be expected to take on a full workload in the lab. This is in addition to lab housekeeping, project work and using or updating outdated and barely usable protocols/documents.New starts become demotivated, in some cases waiting more than 3 months to be trained in what they were employed to do in the first place. Blame culture in the company is rife leaving everyone to adopt a "look out for number one" attitude. Senior management try to employ schemes and plans that could make a difference. However, this is never monitored at ground level to see if it is being employed successfully. The message gets lost or more likely ignored at middle management who continuously push deadlines for tasks on to their department. This then becomes your job- continuously trying to complete massive tasks or projects in a very limited time frame with little to no help to achieve your goals. Career Development- Not much to say here, in my time at the company I was never shown anything to do with career progression despite senior management saying it was a"key area". The exception to this rule would be the customary "you've been here a year" promotion and salary increase to something you probably expected to get when you joined. After this promotion, look forward to supervisors giving you their whims and errands as they can't be bothered to actually go down to the labs and engage situations directly. Pay- "equipment under £10k is peanuts" yet a fair salary must be akin to a diamond as these are rare and extremely hard to come by. Management- My department was ran by a somewhat autocratic manager with a limited grasp on both where the labs are physically located in the building as well as what actually goes on there. Supervisors are either never in work to begin with or too indecisive to do anything. Decisions which affect the lab are regularly made by people who do not have an idea of processes there or how it will affect the people that work there daily. For them, this ticks a box on a spreadsheet thus "mission accomplished". Facilities/labs- The labs are somewhat like a scrapyard, full of old obsolete equipment, while new equipment sits gathering dust for at least a year before it is actually able to be used. Any usable space is highly coveted and difficult to find. A corporate technique was employed to organise the labs so they could "shine". This brings to mind a certain phrase- you can't polish a turd. The company has recently been acquired by Merck which apart from a few nice coloured signs- making the place look like a cheap legoland- hasn't really amounted to much in terms of actually working there.
