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Job outlook for senior science consultants in the United States
Are senior science consultant jobs in demand?
Senior science consultant job and salary trends over time
Senior science consultant jobs over time
Senior science consultant job growth rate over time
| Year | # of jobs | % of population |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 537 | 0.00% |
| 2020 | 553 | 0.00% |
| 2019 | 557 | 0.00% |
| 2018 | 564 | 0.00% |
| 2017 | 563 | 0.00% |
Average senior science consultant salary over time
Senior science consultant salary by year
| Year | Avg. salary | Hourly rate | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | $97,589 | $46.92 | +2.2% |
| 2025 | $95,534 | $45.93 | +1.0% |
| 2024 | $94,624 | $45.49 | +2.9% |
| 2023 | $91,978 | $44.22 | +1.4% |
| 2022 | $90,747 | $43.63 | +3.5% |
Senior science consultant jobs by state
Most common states for senior science consultants
| Rank | State | Population | # of jobs | Employment/ 1000ppl |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | District of Columbia | 693,972 | 247 | 36% |
| 2 | South Dakota | 869,666 | 206 | 24% |
| 3 | Rhode Island | 1,059,639 | 205 | 19% |
| 4 | Vermont | 623,657 | 110 | 18% |
| 5 | New Hampshire | 1,342,795 | 184 | 14% |
| 6 | Massachusetts | 6,859,819 | 910 | 13% |
| 7 | Alabama | 4,874,747 | 621 | 13% |
| 8 | Oklahoma | 3,930,864 | 499 | 13% |
| 9 | Montana | 1,050,493 | 136 | 13% |
| 10 | Utah | 3,101,833 | 368 | 12% |
| 11 | New Jersey | 9,005,644 | 954 | 11% |
| 12 | Oregon | 4,142,776 | 442 | 11% |
| 13 | Mississippi | 2,984,100 | 316 | 11% |
| 14 | Virginia | 8,470,020 | 740 | 9% |
| 15 | Minnesota | 5,576,606 | 482 | 9% |
| 16 | Idaho | 1,716,943 | 149 | 9% |
| 17 | Illinois | 12,802,023 | 1,075 | 8% |
| 18 | Pennsylvania | 12,805,537 | 989 | 8% |
| 19 | Connecticut | 3,588,184 | 270 | 8% |
| 20 | Delaware | 961,939 | 80 | 8% |
Most common cities for senior science consultants
| Rank | City | # of jobs | Employment/ 1000ppl | Avg. salary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Frankfort | 2 | 7% | $91,242 |
| 2 | Annapolis | 2 | 5% | $106,876 |
| 3 | Dover | 2 | 5% | $129,073 |
| 4 | Boston | 11 | 2% | $111,032 |
| 5 | Costa Mesa | 2 | 2% | $112,812 |
| 6 | Hartford | 2 | 2% | $100,817 |
| 7 | Atlanta | 5 | 1% | $90,024 |
| 8 | Minneapolis | 4 | 1% | $84,553 |
| 9 | Washington | 4 | 1% | $123,883 |
| 10 | Sacramento | 3 | 1% | $121,421 |
| 11 | Des Moines | 2 | 1% | $87,380 |
| 12 | Chicago | 6 | 0% | $82,573 |
| 13 | San Francisco | 4 | 0% | $122,142 |
| 14 | San Jose | 4 | 0% | $121,437 |
| 15 | Detroit | 3 | 0% | $101,268 |
| 16 | Los Angeles | 3 | 0% | $114,016 |
| 17 | Denver | 2 | 0% | $87,316 |
| 18 | Indianapolis | 2 | 0% | $90,763 |
Senior Science Consultant job outlook: Expert opinions
Our panel of senior science consultant experts
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Washington State University
University of Pittsburgh
University of Nebraska - Omaha
Wright State University
Aquinas College
St. John's University
Wittenberg University
Harcum College
Elmira College
What will help Senior Science Consultants increase their earning potential?
Frank David MD, PhD: In basic research jobs, the key lab-related skills will continue to be the ones that are commonly used for discovering and developing new therapies: mammalian cell culture, in vitro assays, transfection, immunoprecipitation, Western blots, etc. It’s typically not necessary to 'check all the boxes' in terms of bench skills for a job, but having a few of these key techniques under your belt will give a company confidence that you can learn others. In general across the industry, effective written communication and project management are key skills that cut across almost all jobs and divisions within biotech and pharma. Anything you can do to build and highlight those capabilities will serve you in good stead.
What will help Senior Science Consultants increase their earning potential?
Dr. Michael Marchetti: I think that in the next few years, it will be important to have some wide range of skills across a diversity of sub-disciplines. For example, GIS (geographic information skills), R statistical programming language, modern genetic and genomic techniques, computer programming skills etc. Again, it seems that hard and fast borders/walls separating disciplinary fields are breaking down as our knowledge of the larger biological world expands.
What will help Senior Science Consultants 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 Science Consultants 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 Science Consultant?
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 Science Consultants increase their earning potential?
Jacob Nordman: In the field of neuroscience, the field is increasingly concerned with cellular and pathway specificity – what are the cell types and pathway that control ever-specific physiological functions. Some tools necessary to probe these questions include the powerful single-cell RNA sequencing method, genetic tools like optogenetics and chemogenetics that allow for neural pathway-specific manipulations, and increasingly sophisticated computer models that incorporate machine learning and artificial intelligence. These techniques will only become more precise and integral, so familiarity with them now will set you up to learn the newer versions later.
What will help Senior Science Consultants 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 Science Consultants 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 Science Consultant?
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 Science Consultants 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.
Michael Lorr Ph.D.
Chair, Professor of Sociology, & Director of the Community Leadership ProgramAquinas College
Sociology Department
Are there any particularly good places in the United States for Senior Science Consultants to find work opportunities?
Michael Lorr Ph.D.: Graduates in sociology and community leaders interested in governmental and non-profit work will find many people retiring as the boomers start to exit the workforce--cities like Grand Rapids, MI will have many opportunities in both of these areas.
Joseph Trainor Ph.D.
Associate Professor and ChairpersonSt. John's University
Department of Accountancy
Are there any particularly good places in the United States for Senior Science Consultants to find work opportunities?
Joseph Trainor Ph.D.: Accountants are needed throughout the country, but demand is particularly high in New York City and other metropolitan areas. The trend towards moving into cities may be stagnant or decline, due to the pandemic, but demand for accounting professionals in cities remains strong.
Are there any particularly good places in the United States for Senior Science Consultants to find work opportunities?
Nancy McHugh Ph.D.: I think that there are opportunities in most parts of the country. It is more about what sort of work students are looking for. A lot of philosophy majors go to law school or into non-profit work. There are opportunities for that everywhere. We've had several students go into public health graduate programs, which also has lots of geographic options. That so many of us are learning to work well-remotely is opening up a lot of options for where people live that are not as tied to the location of one's employment. Thus, I'd say most locations can be ideal locations. It is a matter of what individuals are looking for.
How do you envision technology impacting Senior Science Consultants in the next 5 years?
Nancy McHugh Ph.D.: The ability to work remotely and collaborate across platforms is one of the biggest impacts that technology will continue to have on our students. Philosophy grads tend to be very adept and innovative with technology. You see a lot of philosophers developing podcasts and virtual platforms for sharing information. These skills will continue to be built and used in philosophy and out in the workplace.
What general advice would you give to a Senior Science Consultant?
Kristy Matulevich: The general advice I would give would be; first, to become a certified technologist or technician. Once students graduate from a NAACLS (National Accrediting Agency for Clinical Laboratory Science) accredited program, their next step should be to sit for their national certification exam. The exam which my program recommends taking is administered by the ASCP (American Society of Clinical Pathologists), which we feel is the "gold standard" in certification. Many employers either require potential employees to have this credential or give them six months, after they are hired, to pass the exam. Another organization offers a certification exam, AMT (American Medical Technologists); however, my program and the clinical sites in my local area, usually prefer the ASCP certification. Since becoming ASCP certified requires the technician/technologist to maintain their certification by completing continuing education requirements, new graduates who are approved will continue to learn more theory and techniques related to clinical/medical laboratory science, which is helpful at any stage in one's career, to promote lifelong learning. Some states across the nation also require licensure, so I recommend that a new graduate be aware of that when pursuing a job opportunity.
What general advice would you give to a Senior Science Consultant?
Dr. Betsy Smith: I would advise students just graduating to be flexible and open-minded in their job search. Chemistry is a challenging major, and students who succeed in it have learned how to learn, so they shouldn't assume that pure chemistry is the only thing they can do. One growing field is biomedical research, and chemistry majors are often qualified for jobs in that area. If you have other strengths, like writing, there are often jobs that can combine them as a technical writer or work for a science journal. There are jobs out there that might be perfect for you that you haven't heard of until you see an ad for it, so be open to different possibilities.