Present-day laboratories are well equipped and provide excellent working conditions. Most chemists are salaried employees and usually manage to keep a conventional Monday-to-Friday workweek. However, atoms and molecules do not respect the clock, so it may occasionally be necessary to work overtime to finish an experiment.
As in other fields, job opportunities for chemists can vary a great deal depending on the state of the economy. It is difficult to predict future job market conditions, however a broad training centered on chemistry is likely to lead to success. The future prospects of recent graduates will largely be governed by their own efforts and abilities, but the habits of systematic work and scientific reasoning developed in their training will serve them well throughout their careers.
In common with all other sciences, research in chemistry is not always predictable. Chemists must have the ability to be flexible and to give up preconceived ideas when experimental results show that these ideas might be wrong.
Other important personal characteristics are curiosity, initiative and keen powers of observation. Curiosity leads chemists to continually ask questions, and suggest new ways of answering them.
It is important to realize that the solutions to most problems in chemical research require months or even years of work by a number of people. A chemist must therefore have patience and the capacity to work steadily without becoming discouraged. Modern research and development are organized so that some problems are attacked by teams of chemists and other scientists. In this increasingly interdisciplinary field it is important that chemists are able to work well with others, communicate effectively, and be willing to consider the suggestions of others as carefully as they would their own ideas.