May 6, 2004 — Even at this early stage in nanotechnology business development, some labor shortages are starting to show up.
In the short time the nanotech career site Working In Nanotechnology has been active, Nic Mortland, the site’s vice president of sales and marketing, has noted several trends.
“There seems to be a shortage of skilled workers in what I call the middle market at the Ph.D. level, across all science fields with one to five years of commercial experience,” he said. “Every industry has the same issue: quality over quantity.”
Based in Auckland, New Zealand, Working In Nanotechnology is a Web-based bulletin board, launched in March, that provides information on careers, education, and professional training in nanotechnology and related fields.
Mortland said he’s found that employers seem to be unaware of how few really experienced, educated people there are in the various fields surrounding MEMS and nanotechnology. “What I’m finding is a naiveté from startups,” Mortland said. “They think they can find people through universities, but big companies have the universities tied up.”
Although it may seem easy to recruit nanotech employees from a large pool of skilled workers, Mortland said he has found that this is usually not the case. In fact, some employers searching for workers with commercial experience may have to accept students’ summer internships as commercial experience, he said.
Other industry trends the site reveals are “a lot of activity in MEMS, nanotubes and nanomaterials.”
Mortland said that the U.S. government’s decision to cut back on the number of visas granted for high-tech workers would have a huge impact on the industry. He said that the government might believe that U.S. companies should hire Americans, but desired skills may be hard to find. “Or they may want higher pay,” he said. “It’s hard for startups to pay [those salaries]. This is an issue that is really going to impact this industry.”
Other U.S. government agencies are barely aware of the existing nanotech job market. Bureau of Labor Statistics economist Jon Sargent explained why. “That whole nanotechnology field is so new and specialized and thus far, small, that we’re not set up to collect data on it yet,” he said. “It’s still pretty much a research thing.”
Bureau economists don’t keep track of research jobs, either, but Sargent noted that employment in higher education has been growing.
Even though some venture capital has begun to flow to startup nanotechnology companies again, most announcements of jobs in nanotechnology companies are written in the future tense.
In Henrietta, N.Y., for example, in October last year, two technology companies announced a “plan to invest” a total of more than $17 million and to create more than 500 jobs.
The companies had 22 employees at the time, according to a report in the Rochester, N.Y., Democrat and Chronicle. The news included information about a potential $1.3 million in local government grants and low-interest loans.
Contrast that future orientation with Working In Nanotechnology. Before launching the site, Mortland spent about four months in the U.S. to learn what skills employers were looking for, especially in the general science community.
He talked to post-docs and undergrads, asking them how they were going to find jobs out there. He lined up about 2,500 registered job seekers in six months, most from the United States. Now, 450 of those resumes have been sorted for keywords to link to a database.
The database contains fields for nano jobs by science — like biology, chemistry, computer science, materials science, physics and physical sciences. It also lists nano jobs by industry and by technology.
The site has about 70 jobs posted. Positions available include everything from leader of the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies at Los Alamos National Laboratory to research assistant and fuel cell test engineer.
“Probably the majority of nano jobs are in the academic marketplace, followed by corporate and government labs,” Mortland said. “We have top-, middle- and entry-level jobs.”
He has spoken with more than 150 employers to discuss services. Three early registered user employers include Zyvex Corp. (News, Web), Nanophase Technologies Corp. (Quote, News, Web), and Los Alamos National Laboratory. An active sponsor of the site is the nanotech think tank Foresight Institute of Palo Alto, Calif.
The privately supported site was able to get a running start because founders Scott Matieson and Hayley Roberts already had other job-match sites for New Zealand, United Kingdom, Asian and Australian jobs. Working In Nanotechnology is a subsidiary of their company, Working In Ltd.
Matieson and Roberts founded the site after noticing that there were no big science sites addressing the problem of finding skilled science workers. “That gave us the confidence to make a centralized platform by academic and business fields.”
In addition to Working In’s site, the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative has a page devoted to nanotechnology careers on its Web site.