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Skills that raise your pay

• Chromatography

  High performance liquid chromatography and gas chromatography are the workhorse instruments. Being the person who can fix one is worth money.

• Mass spectrometry

  Harder instruments, fewer people who can run them, better pay.

• Quality systems

  Writing methods, handling deviations and surviving an audit. This is the route into a quality assurance job.

• Statistics

  Control charts and method validation. It separates a technician from a button pusher.

• Programming

  A little Python to pull data out of an instrument system saves your lab days a month.