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Job outlook for senior formulation scientists in the United States
Are senior formulation scientist jobs in demand?
Senior formulation scientist job and salary trends over time
Senior formulation scientist jobs over time
Senior formulation scientist job growth rate over time
| Year | # of jobs | % of population |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 1,391 | 0.00% |
| 2020 | 1,616 | 0.00% |
| 2019 | 1,630 | 0.00% |
| 2018 | 1,542 | 0.00% |
| 2017 | 1,431 | 0.00% |
Average senior formulation scientist salary over time
Senior formulation scientist salary by year
| Year | Avg. salary | Hourly rate | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | $102,574 | $49.31 | +3.1% |
| 2024 | $99,525 | $47.85 | +4.7% |
| 2023 | $95,064 | $45.70 | +3.3% |
| 2022 | $92,015 | $44.24 | +1.9% |
| 2021 | $90,267 | $43.40 | --2.1% |
Senior formulation scientist jobs by state
Most common states for senior formulation scientists
| Rank | State | Population | # of jobs | Employment/ 1000ppl |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Massachusetts | 6,859,819 | 1,465 | 21% |
| 2 | Maryland | 6,052,177 | 861 | 14% |
| 3 | Delaware | 961,939 | 132 | 14% |
| 4 | Virginia | 8,470,020 | 1,064 | 13% |
| 5 | New Jersey | 9,005,644 | 967 | 11% |
| 6 | South Dakota | 869,666 | 98 | 11% |
| 7 | Vermont | 623,657 | 66 | 11% |
| 8 | New Hampshire | 1,342,795 | 128 | 10% |
| 9 | North Dakota | 755,393 | 75 | 10% |
| 10 | District of Columbia | 693,972 | 66 | 10% |
| 11 | Washington | 7,405,743 | 695 | 9% |
| 12 | North Carolina | 10,273,419 | 821 | 8% |
| 13 | Montana | 1,050,493 | 87 | 8% |
| 14 | Rhode Island | 1,059,639 | 84 | 8% |
| 15 | Alaska | 739,795 | 56 | 8% |
| 16 | Wyoming | 579,315 | 45 | 8% |
| 17 | California | 39,536,653 | 2,645 | 7% |
| 18 | Pennsylvania | 12,805,537 | 892 | 7% |
| 19 | Oregon | 4,142,776 | 271 | 7% |
| 20 | Connecticut | 3,588,184 | 267 | 7% |
Most common cities for senior formulation scientists
| Rank | City | # of jobs | Employment/ 1000ppl | Avg. salary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Waltham | 1 | 2% | $107,128 |
| 2 | Cambridge | 1 | 1% | $107,128 |
| 3 | Little Rock | 1 | 1% | $86,442 |
| 4 | Palo Alto | 1 | 1% | $151,169 |
| 5 | San Diego | 1 | 0% | $134,295 |
Senior Formulation Scientist job outlook: Expert opinions
Our panel of senior formulation scientist experts
Washburn University of Topeka
Pepperdine University
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Washington State University
University of Pittsburgh
University of Nebraska - Omaha
Wright State University
Susan Bjerke
Associate Professor of BiologyWashburn University of Topeka
Biological And Physical Sciences
What will help Senior Formulation Scientists increase their earning potential?
Susan Bjerke: Some of the skills that will be important in the next 3-5 years will be general critical thinking skills and the ability to adapt to changing technology. Almost all science fields are increasingly dependent on technology, so being able to learn new skills and change the way you do things in your job will be important. Being an effective communicator, both in writing and orally, is an overlooked skill in the sciences and is always an important asset.
What will help Senior Formulation Scientists increase their earning potential?
Rachel Tan Ph.D.: Listen and be curious: ask questions (the why and how?), ask for opportunities, do extra readings outside of work. Aim for excellence: treat each assigned task as priority–go above and beyond. Connect: talk to colleagues, your boss, staff–be excited to learn from others. Be grateful: constantly reflect on the small details that led you to this point, for gratitude gives you foundation for joy during your career.
Luz Garcini PhD, MPH
Assistant ProfessorWhat will help Senior Formulation Scientists increase their earning potential?
Luz Garcini PhD, MPH: Build a unique niche and new skills (another language), disseminate your work via high impact networks/avenues, get mentoring in negotiation.
What will help Senior Formulation Scientists increase their earning potential?
Kristopher Koudelka Ph.D.: Always keep learning. These fields change fast! The leading edge is always unveiling new information that can be applied to the area you are working on, and there will be new techniques developed that allow you to answer questions in more efficient ways. You must learn to regularly update yourself through conversations, reading, conferences, and trainings. This change is fun and exciting, embrace it. It will keep your job feeling new.
What will help Senior Formulation Scientists increase their earning potential?
Jason Ferrell: While technology is changing at a rapid pace and artificial intelligence will no doubt play an ever increasing role in life and science, I believe the foundations of success will not change. These include, 1. Being responsive and timely. 2. Possessing excellent written and oral communication skills. 3. Being a helpful team member. Regardless of skill set or expertise, these are three pillars of success.
What general advice would you give to a Senior Formulation Scientist?
Jacob Nordman: Salary potential in my field of neuroscience almost always involves publications, awards, and technical acumen. Therefore, as I mentioned, it is important to start early looking for opportunities that can strengthen these areas. Another important aspect of getting high-profile, and thus high-paying, positions, is being able to tell a story with your research and career. Employers want to see that you have thought deeply and strategically about your career and where it’s going. This will allow them to believe you are a safe bet and worthy of their investment.
What will help Senior Formulation Scientists increase their earning potential?
Lindsey du Toit: Take every opportunity you can to learn, network, and build an effective team of people that bring a greater breadth and depth of skills and expertise to the work on which you will be focusing. Cultivate a life-long sense of intellectual curiosity and learning. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Treat ignorance as an opportunity to learn. Questions demonstrate you want to understand the situation/problem effectively and that you are paying attention. Always demonstrate integrity in your work. It is one of the most valuable traits you can bring to your career. Be kind and supportive of your colleagues.
What will help Senior Formulation Scientists increase their earning potential?
Arjumand Ghazi Ph. D: Having an advanced degree such as a PhD and even a few years postdoc is a good way to start at a higher level. It often allows one to make up for the reduced earnings during the training periods while increasing long-term earnings.
Andrew Riquier Ph.D.
InstructorUniversity of Nebraska - Omaha
Neurobiology And Neurosciences
What general advice would you give to a Senior Formulation Scientist?
Andrew Riquier Ph.D.: Apply for the positions you want, even if you feel underqualified. I know plenty of people who have applied for jobs they didn't quite meet the requirements for, and got hired for other reasons. In my experience, many recent graduates choose to take time to strengthen their resumes by retaking classes, working jobs they don't particularly want to get experience, etc. There is some value in that, particularly if you have been unsuccessful attaining the position you want, or if you want to see if you even enjoy that type of work. But if you are confident in what you want to do, go for it; in the worst-case scenario, you are in the same position you would be if you hadn't applied, but now you have experience applying and have potentially gained a contact in the field.
What type of skills will young Senior Formulation Scientists need?
David Cool Ph.D.: The skill sets that young graduates will need when they graduate and enter the workforce are similar to and vastly different from just 15-30 years ago. If they are working in a laboratory setting, then the standards are the same; accurate pipetting, the ability to make complex buffers, and understanding how all the necessary equipment in a lab works. However, that is not nearly enough nowadays. The equipment and instrumentation have been expanding exponentially to the point that you will be working with both expensive and complicated instruments to generate a more considerable amount of data than anyone ever thought possible. Standards for labs today will be using digital imaging devices to capture everything from microscopic images, to western blots, to automated living cell analysis using multi-well plates. Multiplexed assays for 27 to 50 to 1050 cytokines and proteins have replaced single marker ELISA. But knowing ELISA will allow you to be trained to do the multiplexed assays. Most pharmaceutical companies have a great need still for 'old-fashioned' HPLC techniques. Every student I have had in my research techniques class, that graduates and goes for a Pharma position, comes back and tells me they asked them if they could run an HPLC.
Some were even given a test to see if they understood the concept. This then leads to mass spectrometry, LCMS, MALDI-TOF, and even GCMS, and everything that has been developed around those basic techniques is now commonplace in most core facilities and Pharma. New methods for flow cytometry, FACS, are necessary for the higher throughput drug discovery types of labs. Molecular biology has evolved from simple PCR machines that could run 24 samples, just 25 years ago, to digital PCR machines that can run 384 pieces today and email the final data to you at home, while you sleep. Knowing how to calculate the PCR data is extremely critical, as it isn't intuitive, and people tend to take short cuts. Knowing how to do that will be vital. Cell culture and working with animals are still common ways to generate data in any lab, and people who have those skills will always have a job. What do all these techniques have in common? They all have evolved to the point that no one is an expert in every one of them. Labs focus and concentrate on the ones they need the most and make use of them over a long period. What a student should develop is what I call a big toolbox. Learn as many of these techniques as you can, and then use them. Understanding that these are all cyclic and that you may get rusty, or the technology will change. It doesn't matter. By being trained in any of these, it will mean that you can be prepared for other things, that you can catch up and learn and update your techniques in your toolbox. This is what any PI running a lab will be looking for, someone who can be trained, and can evolve and adapt to different technologies, know how they work and how they can be used, what the data looks like when it is working well, and what it looks like when it isn't. The people who have these skills will always be employable.
There is a greater need than ever for workers to analyze data and synthesize a reasonable idea about what it means. This means that they must understand their experiments at a deeper level than just pipetting buffers and timing reactions. They must know what is happening, and if there is a problem, first, they have a problem and then how to solve it. Bioinformatics has become one of the fastest-growing fields. The increased amount of data, whether from standard assays run in an ordinary lab or high throughput data, needs more crunching. The future researcher will not be able to get by just knowing how to use a computer stats program but will be required to understand how to run data in R or Python or whatever new data analysis package is coming next. This becomes even more critical as the data becomes more complex, i.e., 27 cytokines analyzed in 3 different tissues over three other times, from 14 different groups, 6 of which are controls, with the rest being toxin and then treatment groups and authorities. A simple two way ANOVA just doesn't cut it. For this, machine learning tools, pattern recognition, neural networks, topological data analysis (TDA), Deep Learning, etc., are becoming the norm and are being advanced and changed to give more and more substance to what the data means. Students who can operate instruments to generate data and run more complex types of analysis on this 'big data' are in great demand. Likewise, learning the computer-generated design of drugs 'in silico' is a growing field that is now required to screen tens of thousands of compounds before generating them in the lab. This will need someone who can think three-dimensionally; even though the software and advanced computers can do that, it helps if your brain is wired that way, at least a little.
Aside from instruments and complex data analysis, consider where the clinical research is headed. With COVID19, the need to quickly advance drugs from potential use to clinical application has undergone an exponential increase. Lives are being lost daily to the lack of a vaccine or medication that can attenuate to any level the impact the virus has on the human body. The future clinical researcher will need to understand how the instruments work and how tests are run, how a vaccine works, how the virus or disease manifests itself, and how to get it under control. This will only be possible if the researcher is familiar with much of what I wrote above. You won't need to be an expert on virtually everything, but you'll need to understand it so you can use it to synthesize new ideas that may be applicable in the clinical environment. COVID19 is a perfect example. One of the early struggles with this virus was how to test for it. Antibodies weren't developed for it in the very beginning, so an ELISA was out.
In contrast, PCR is one of the most sensitive methods to identify genetic material, such as viruses. So, early on, PCR primers were created that could be used to run a PCR to determine if a person had a live virus. However, the first such PCRs had high false negatives and positives. Further refinement led to the creation of PCR primer sets and protocols that allowed for a more accurate and faster test. An advantage that anyone who has been trained in biotechnology will know the basics of developing a test. If it is a PCR, then what goes into that. Suppose it is an ELISA, how it works, and what you need to set it up. Imagine a test strip similar to the one used for at-home pregnancy tests. This came about in much the same way, through experimentation and developing a way to lower the false negatives and positives, to allow a quick, 5-minute test that could determine if a particular hormone was in your urine at a stage of pregnancy when many women may not have realized there was a possibility they could be pregnant. The person entering the workforce that can think in these ways will be employable and will be able to move between jobs and continue with a very successful and enriching career.