Question: what qualifications do you need to be a scientist? x

Jayne Charnock answered on 16 Mar 2011:

Great question, it can seem really confusing. Basically it depends what job you want to do- like all jobs there are different ‘levels’, from the people that make up solutions for the lab, look after animals or sterilise our equiptment, to the people that run experiments day-to-day, to people who run certain facilities (e.g. the microscopes or gene sequencing departments), to research managers who run the show, to Prinicple Investigators or Lab Heads who are the most senior scientists. The people i work with have all kinds of different qualifications!

A good place to start is good GCSES in science, followed by A-levels or equivalent in a science. In other countries they have alot of apprenticeships for people straight out of school but im not sure of the process here. Certainly there are lab technician jobs for people with college qualifications. After that, getting a degree and some experience working in a lab will help and those people usually become technicians or research assistants. To progress more quickly and further up the scale it is usual for someone with a good degree result to do a PhD (a 3 year research project) and they are then on the path to becoming a more senior researcher.

Where are you up to in school- are you thinking of a career in science? Feel free to ask any further questions about this as its a complicated topic!