Pharmaceutical ScientistOdds of Hanging On

Once you are in, you're pretty stable as a pharmaceutical scientist — as long as you don't break some of that fancy-shmancy equipment. Drug development takes lots of research hours and many, many years. While you may not stick to the same project for ten years and see the product go into clinical trials, you are developing those research muscles and becoming more essential to the drug R&D process every day. What's more, there is a persistent boom in the biotech industry and government-funded research. So as long as people will need pharmaceutical drugs or a better skin cream, pharmaceutical scientists will have a stable line of work.