Honestly just work somewhere else.
Firstly, the job is a lab tech role and is just called “scientific officer” to trick you into applying. Everything you do is boring and repetitive and could be done by a 5yr old tbh, don’t think you will be coming here to “use your degree” because you won’t. There is no career progression at all, you will learn different clean rooms (one a year) but they don’t really mean anything.
Don’t listen to the reviews about how nice the people are because they are not, they are not very welcoming when you start and the place is like a primary school, full of people gossiping about one another and never saying it to them. Certain people will put you down for no reason at all and no matter how hard you work there will be people saying you don’t do any work (they don’t) and the lab manager will listen to all gossip and bring it up in your review meetings. Also the lab manager is not very professional and does not understand confidentiality, if you tell him something private everybody else will know by the end of the week. The lab manager is also very rude & will speak to you like sh*t and if he is in a bad mood then no doubt he will take it out on you.
You have completely unpredictable breaks as you cannot have a break until your main task is done for the day, so on a busy day you might not get a break until 3pm or at all.
Clean room working conditions are horrendous, you will go in at 8 and cannot come out until all samples are processed, no toilet break, no water, nothing, most of the time you will be in there until 1/2/3pm. They will tell you you have the option to leave for a break but if you do you will actually get told off because it delays the day. Clean room work is also very repetitive and mind numbing.
Stuff is always broken and doesn’t get fixed for months/years. Clean room temperatures in the winter are very cold (maybe like 8 degrees) and in the summer far too warm (around 30 odd) as the heating/air con units do not work and haven’t worked for years.
Genuine sexism and favouritism within the lab staff, if you are a girl definitely don’t work here. The boys will sit upstairs doing nothing all day and the lab manager will not speak a word to them, the girls do 99% of the tasks during the day and the boys do nothing and when you FINALLY sit down for lunch the lab manager will ask “do you need something to do?”.
Almost everyone is leaving and there has been info about hiring people and firing them by failing their end of probation so if you want a stable job just don’t bother, probably fine for temporary work.
The wage doesn’t reflect the clean room working conditions you get like an extra £550 a YEAR when you gain a competency in one which may as well be none existent.