Experts fear that the COVID-19 pandemic will yield a tough employment outlook for chemical professionals jobs.

Luis Martínez remembers 2008 like it was yesterday. He was searching for a job, and the economy was in a deep recession brought on by the financial crisis. Hiring freezes gripped employers of all types, and there were few chemistry jobs to be had. In fact, many companies were in the midst of mass layoffs. It took Martínez several years of cobbling together short-term stints before landing a tenure-track position in academia.

Twelve years later, that “brutal” job market still haunts Martínez. Now the director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Trinity University, he worries about what new graduates and job seekers will be up against in the economic downturn triggered by the novel coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19. “I think the entire community needs to be prepared for a year worse than 2008,” he says.

The economic fallout of the pandemic is growing. Across the US, for example, universities have announced hiring freezes and pay reductions, with additional cost-cutting measures expected to come in the fall. Worldwide, the chemical industry reports reduced chemical demand and predicts job losses. Although the pharmaceutical and biotech industries are seeing increased demand for their products, even they likely won’t emerge from this recession unscathed.

“Things are just awful,” says economist Paul Hodges, who studies trends in the chemical industry. “This is the worst economic environment since the Great Depression” of the 1930s. By the end of April, more than 30 million people in the US had filed for unemployment this year.

“There are good times to come out of college, and there are bad times. This is a bad time,” Hodges says. “There’s no point in trying to sugarcoat that pill.”

Nevertheless, survivors of past recessions, like Martínez, say that by keeping an open mind, broadening their networks, and developing an entrepreneurial mindset, recent graduates and other job seekers can still carve out a productive and satisfying career.

Stephanie Santos-Díaz was looking forward to graduating in June from Purdue University with her PhD in chemical education. She had decided to pursue a career in policy, and she saw several jobs that sounded promising. She even started applying for a few last fall.

But most of those prospects dried up when pandemic shutdowns hit. “It feels really stressful,” Santos-Díaz says. She spoke with C&EN from her apartment, where she was following a state stay-at-home order. An incessantly beeping fire alarm—it was too high for her to reach—seemed to highlight the urgency of her situation. “There is a lot of uncertainty in my near future,” she says.

Santos-Díaz is far from alone in feeling that uncertainty, judging from the academic chemists who spoke to C&EN about their experiences during the pandemic. Hundreds of schools have frozen hiring, and some have furloughed staff.

At Brown University, “it’s a freeze, but it’s not one style fits all,” says Lai-Sheng Wang, chair of the Chemistry Department. Brown froze hiring in March but still honored offers in any search in which finalists had been identified. The Chemistry Department had a search almost completed, but its pick turned down the job. Now the department has to wait and see whether it will be allowed to continue the search next year.

Wang says it’s a good trade-off to freeze hiring and salaries for now rather than furlough people. “We want to still emerge to be a strong institution,” he says. “You can’t just fire people, then get them back.”

At Indiana University Bloomington, Chemistry Department chair Caroline Chick Jarrold says her faculty roster is robust enough to make it through the university’s hiring freeze. For now, she is more concerned about several administrative positions that are opening up because of retirements, including a financial analyst, a purchasing manager, and a capital equipment manager. If possible, “we want to make sure we replace the staff we have,” she says. In the long term, the problem is “mostly just the uncertainty about how things will play out” and the resulting inability to plan, Jarrold says.

The gravity of the larger pandemic hit home for the department when a longtime faculty member died of COVID-19, Jarrold says. “Whatever we are going through is nothing compared to what family members are going through.”

Hiring freezes, furloughs, and other cost-cutting measures being taken in academia reflect the huge unknowns that US universities face in the pandemic, says Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU).

For many, the first financial blow was having to refund fees for residence halls and food when they shut down in the spring. But the real danger will be if universities are unable to bring students back on campuses in the fall. “It would be a fundamental threat to the institutions,” McPherson says.

Compounding the problem is the quick hit of the pandemic, which didn’t leave time to plan. In addition, many public universities had barely recovered from the 2008–9 recession because states were slow to restore funding cuts.

Some states have already reduced funding again for colleges and universities, and education institutions anticipate even more cuts, McPherson says. The APLU has asked Congress for support for public schools, including low-interest loans and an extension of tax breaks that were afforded to companies. “We are going to face real difficulties,” 

McPherson says. “We already are.”

Ali says he will just have to wait and see. He and his fellow postdocs “are not depressed and crying,” he says. “We are optimistic and at the same time concerned.”

From what Jarrold has seen, pharmaceutical companies are still hiring, so the problem might be primarily for students who are looking for academic jobs. Her department might be able to keep students on by hiring temporarily to teach online courses, she says. Several faculty plan to keep postdocs on longer to make sure they have jobs.

When he first started graduate school at Brown, Stephen Kocheril was set on a career in academia. Now, the third-year graduate student isn’t sure whether that is realistic. “It will be a lot about what is available when I am at that point,” he says.

If the pandemic causes just one bad year, he might be in a good position to get an academic job the following year. But if it goes on longer, he will consider other options.

“It’s hard not to feel a little bit of worry,” he says. “The world is a scary place right now.”

Back at Purdue, Santos-Díaz still hopes one of the jobs she applied for will come through. If one doesn’t, she’s made a contingency plan to live with a friend nearby for a few months, which because of the proximity seems to her a better option than moving back to Puerto Rico, where she’s from.

Even if she gets one of the jobs she applied for, she knows a starting date could be delayed for months. “My funding runs out in July,” Santos-Díaz says. “I wouldn’t know what I would do in that transition. I still need to use money to survive.”

The chemical industry is also bracing for a tough economic climate. “Somebody hit a giant pause button,” says Ron McElhaney Jr., owner of Management Recruiters of Savannah, which recruits for the specialty chemical job market. “Over the last 3 months, my business has cratered. Nobody is hiring anybody.”

But McElhaney is optimistic that when the pandemic gets under control, hiring will come “roaring back.”

Others are not so sure. “It’s going to be several years before we come out the other side,” economist Hodges says. “And when we come out, we’ll be coming out in a completely different place from where we went in. There’s no business as usual here.” To survive, he says, businesses will need to focus on potential new opportunities that will develop.