by John Fetzer » Tue Feb 01, 2005 11:00 pm
Let me add what will probably be a very long response since I was an industrial analytical chemist for a large company for over two decades. First, the other responses were true to a degree, but overall the field is much more challenging. You will have a huge variety of projects in every part of your company. The development chemists will need to know what is going on in their lab-scale work, then when it gets scaled up to pilot plant size, then to manufacturing. This leads to trace analyses to get regulatory approval (in the US that is FDA, EPA, and OSHA). You get called in on allsorts of plant and product problems, such as off-spec product or low yields in a plant. If the problem is recurring and has a big economic impact, you are involved in problem solving of a more fundamental sort - I have three patents on projects of that sort. In many instances you are teams made up of engineers, sales or other people and your role is to be The Chemist.
As far as supervision, team leading, and managing, a large company has several analytical labs specializing in each area - chromatography, mass spectrometry, atomic spectrometry, and so on. You can run one of those and later move into running several as a group or all as a manager of a hundred people woth a multimillion-dollar budget.
In industry there is a greater need for analytical chemists than there are trained ones coming out of universities. Most people doing analytical were organic, inorganic, physical, etc.
Dave's comment is only true if you let yourself get pigeon-holed and obsolescent. Analytical techniques pop up and become very hot. The mass spec techniques like time-of-flight or MALDI are old stuff in the analytical world, as are all the electrophoretic separations. New variations have led to new applications. Over 90 % of the people doing those learned on-the-job. I started out as a GC-MS person in grad school, did HPLC at first in industry, branched out into fluorescence and UV spectrometry, and still expand (I also dabbled in organic syntheses when needed - making unavailable standard compounds, NMR and IR, using an atomic spectrometer as a chromatographic detector and a few other areas. In industry you answer the big-dollar questions however you can.
I could go on and on, but send me a note if you need more.
John