FDA jobs are opening up now, as part of a long term hiring process designed to add 1300 positions over the next four years. As with anything to do with a federal agency, political wrangling is largely the cause for this. Under the Bush Administration, a lot of positions within the FDA were never filled as their prior job holders retired or left the agency; this was part of a general process of trimming budgetary excess, coupled with pork barrel politics. (This also happens under Democratic Administrations – the best thing for rejuvenation of the agency is regular shifts in which party is in political power every decade or so.) This sort of thing has happened throughout FDA history.

The immediate term problems from letting the FDA attrit itself down are far reaching, and subtle – and they impact not just people who work at the FDA, but companies that are trying to bring new products to market. As the number of scientific and medical staff at the FDA have dwindled over the last three years, the rate at which products go through their Phase II and Phase III trials has dropped.

From the consumer protection side of things, the number of people working in the FDA's field offices have had lower attrition rates, but even then, there have been some losses. What's been happening of late is that there's been a strong push to hire people in the following areas :

• Scientific and Medical Staff
• Field Office staff
• Mid-level managerial staff

As with any organization that's adding people to the rosters quickly, there will be some cases of mis-hires and bad hires; the FDA has asked for, and Congress has approved, some direct hire slots for FDA positions in some of these areas.


Scientific and Medical Staff Positions

Working as a scientist at the FDA is less about doing original research and discovery, and more about auditing clinical trial results, and managing them. As a result, it tends to get a different type of scientist than one working in a research position at a university or in the private sector. These positions are particularly difficult to fill because the FDA's hours are currently long, and the job combines many of the aspects of tedium in lab work with managerial duties, tracking down data sets and doing analysis. It does have the benefit of paying well.

Medical staff at the FDA are usually MDs who focus on medical device testing and providing a comparative audit on drug trials. Interestingly enough, it turns into a good 'second career' for MDs who discover that their temperment doesn't mesh well with dealing with patients. While Hollywood tends to paint doctors as being.


Working In The Field

Other staff positions being filled within the FDA in the sciences include biologists, toxicologists, FDA inspector, veterinary medical specialists and epidemiologists, all of whom play important roles as detectives in tracking down outbreaks of food borne pathogens, and veterinary disease outbreaks.

Other field office workers include statisticians, and engineers – both electrical and mechanical – investigating incidents after they've happened, to isolate things down to a root cause. These jobs, in the law enforcement side of the agency, tend to be lower paying, and involve a lot more travel. They're also being hotly recruited.


Managerial Staff

While there isn't as strong a push for managerial staff hiring in the FDA as there is for field researchers and lab scientists, any organization trying to grow by 1,300 jobs is going to need managerial staff to ensure that they're deployed properly, have the assets and materials they need and are otherwise supported with the administrative direction needed to be effective at their jobs.

Managerial staff with strong scientific backgrounds are particularly in demand, because science administration tends to be a difficult field to fill. Other managerial staff with medical and statistical training are also being recruited, though most of these positions are expected to be filled through government service position transfers.

The final result of this hiring push for FDA jobs is going to be interesting to watch; there will be some interesting growing pains as a new infusion of talent is integrated into the FDA's organizational culture. With luck, many of the new hires will be used to help expedite product approvals.