How To Become A Chemistry Lecturer: What It Is and Career Path

What is a chemistry lecturer and how to become one

Updated January 8, 2025

2 min read

Quoted expert

Juan de la Puente Herrero

There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being a chemistry lecturer. For example, did you know that they make an average of $26.23 an hour? That's $54,557 a year! Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow 12% and produce 159,400 job opportunities across the U.S.

What general advice would you give to a chemistry lecturer?

Juan de la Puente Herrero

Spanish Lecturer I, Northern Michigan University

- As precarious as things are looking for people from my generation, the fields of Romance Languages and Linguistics have an advantage that has gotten me out of more than one financial distress: they are incredibly versatile. If you acquire the necessary skills for it (and don't skip the step of actually learning them, please), you can quickly pick up different 'side hustles' that require minimal infrastructure. However, the idea of turning them into your main source of income could quickly become flimsy and unstable. You don't want to be the person who relies solely on occasional students to tutor, translations to complete, or texts to proofread.

If you do want to maximize your salary potential in this field with a single source of income, you are going to have to deal with a tremendous amount of bureaucracy, technical requirements, and elitism. If your dream profession in this field involves teaching and being financially stable, you probably want to look into getting a PhD. In order to get there, you need to carefully study how willing you are to remain broke for a few years, even though there isn't a tenured job assured at the other end of the tunnel. On a brighter note, I have met lots of lecturers in higher education who enjoy a comfortable salary and a peaceful work life, but in order to get there, most of them had to suffer through multiple precarious contracts and on-and-off appointments, which are very stressful situations to be on, specially for non-citizens like me.

I hope that my answers don't discourage anyone from getting into this field. I just described the ugliest parts of working in it, but I would be more than happy to dedicate double the words to explaining the things that I enjoy about working with languages and Linguistics.

ScoreChemistry LecturerUS Average

Salary

4.3

Avg. Salary $54,557

Avg. Salary $59,228

Stability level

6.6

Growth rate 12%

Growth rate 0.3%

Diversity

5.1

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 0.28%

Asian 17.54%

Black or African American 6.20%

Hispanic or Latino 8.92%

Unknown 4.77%

White 62.29%

Gender

female 42.47%

male 57.53%

Age - 46

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 3.00%

Asian 7.00%

Black or African American 14.00%

Hispanic or Latino 19.00%

White 57.00%

Gender

female 47.00%

male 53.00%

Age - 46

Stress level

6.6

Stress level is high

7.1 - high

Complexity level

10.0

Complexity level is advanced

7 - challenging

Work life balance

5.0

Work life balance is fair

6.4 - fair

Key steps to become a chemistry lecturer

Explore chemistry lecturer education requirements

Most common chemistry lecturer degrees

Bachelor's

52.2 %

Master's

28.4 %

Doctorate

16.4 %

Start to develop specific chemistry lecturer skills

Skills	Percentages
General Chemistry	29.73%
Chemistry Courses	13.69%
Laboratory Courses	9.38%
Lab Reports	7.86%
Synthesis	5.07%

Research chemistry lecturer duties and responsibilities

Manage courses via online Moodle2 platform, including recording lectures and uploading PowerPoint notes.
Develop methods for the analysis of environmental and petrochemical samples using GC and HPLC.
Schedule classes for over 1500 students per semester and allocate an annual budget of over $400K.
Assist Ph.D. graduate student in organic polymer synthesis by completing tedious, repetitive experiments and computing the amount of reagents/buffers need.

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