Hamlet's Quandary - To train or not to train, that is the question. If the answer to this question is yes, then further questions arise such as what type of training is appropriate? In times of recession and budget cuts, training and conferences are an easy area in which to save money. But is it really a saving? Where will new ideas and skills come from? Not from recruitment, because in most companies jobs are being lost not created. In this situation attendance at training courses and/or conferences becomes an essential way to bring new ideas and solutions in to an organization.

The cost of travelling to and attending a training course or conference is often thought to be expensive and a reason for not attending. But if you get one idea that solves an existing problem when you get back to work the expense has surely been worthwhile. And it is very likely that the attendee will pick up other ideas, which can be used to solve other problems that crop up in the future.

Update on Latest Developments and Techniques

There is sometimes a view that companies hire chemists and chemical engineers who are already trained - they are at least graduates and often have higher qualifications, such as MSc or Ph.D., sometimes with post-doctoral experience. But there are aspects of industrial chemistry that are not taught at universities, such as the skills needed in process research and development, scale up or indeed the biological/biochemical understanding required in medicinal chemistry. Companies will often spend money on training courses on report writing or presentation skills while ignoring some of the more practical scientific and technical courses that are available. And of course it is important to remember that chemistry does not stop when a graduate leaves university and enters the industry; refresher courses giving updates on recent academic discoveries can help more experienced industrial researchers catch up on the latest developments and techniques.

Academic vs. Industrial

Some new reactions and transformations can look very "academic" and not suitable for industrial scale up, but this is where good process development chemists come in. About 25 years ago, it was very unusual to be scaling up chiral chemistry, or using alkyl lithiums on scale, or to work under cryogenic conditions (-78ºC or lower) in pilot plants, but these are all fairly routine operations nowadays. When I first came across the type of olefin metathesis chemistry for which Yves Chauvin, Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2005, I was skeptical about its applications in the fine chemicals industry. However, ring-closing metathesis reactions have been scaled up at Boehringer Ingelheim, Glaxosmithkline, and Johnson & Johnson, among others.

Attendees at Scientific Update courses sometimes wonder why this material is not taught in universities (particularly referring to our course on chemical development and scale up). University chemistry departments teach and train chemists for a wide range of industries, from petrochemicals through bulk and speciality chemicals to agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals. We should also not forget inorganic chemical industry and paints, coatings and so on, and to teach a course on process development that caters for all these possible industries would be impractical. Some universities offer higher degrees in fine chemical process development (typically at the master's level) but this is usually a full-time course of 1-2 years duration.

Many national chemical societies offer short courses on a variety of subjects ranging from management skills to technical courses on chemistry and chemical engineering topics. The drawback with many of the technical courses is that they are mainly run by academics, whereas the real expertise in applied industrial topics resides within the industry. There are two courses with industrial tutors, such as the medicinal chemistry course organized by the Swiss Chemical Society, and the Scientific Update course on chemical development and scale up in the fine chemical and pharmaceutical industries, which is organized in Germany by the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh). However, these are the exceptions rather than the norm.

The chemical development and scale up course was originally devised by Dr Trevor Laird, the founder of Scientific Update and the editor of the Organic Process Research and Development journal (published by the American Chemical Society) because he saw new entrants to the area of process research and development making many of the same mistakes he had made when he started his industrial career after leaving university.

Staying Up To Date

There are alternatives to attending courses and conferences, such as reading books and keeping up with the literature. Academic discoveries are published in the peer-reviewed literature, and there are now a number of books on process development and other areas of applied chemistry that are relevant to industry. However, while these are invaluable sources of information and ideas, the most efficient form of learning or knowledge transfer is carried out face-to-face with written material as a back-up and for reinforcement.
One alternative area that has developed in the last few years is the use of webinars, , and this is a very interesting area but falls somewhere between actually attending events and reading the literature. There is an interactive element in webinars where "attendees" can ask questions and discuss topics, but there is still that lack of face-to-face interaction which is so critical for efficient communication.

Modern Communication

It seems that the latest generation of young chemists (and young people in general) are less likely to attend external events possibly because they have grown up with the Internet and remote communication in general (text messages, e-mail, Facebook etc.), but you gain so much more than just the information provided at a training course or conference. Networking with people from other companies leads to all sorts of opportunities and if nothing else provides reassurance that all companies have similar problems.

My recommendation is to get out there, learn about new developments or industrial applications and most importantly, meet people.