The Scientist magazine hosts annual Best Places to Work surveys that allow employees in academia, industry, and postdoctoral positions to provide feedback on their work environments. This year's surveys are open until November 15th, with past results showing companies like Genomic Health, Exelixis, Tec Laboratories, Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Pioneer Hi-Bred, and Amgen ranking highly. International industry leaders like AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Roche, and Novartis also performed well according to their employees. The surveys assess important workplace factors and conditions to help professionals and institutions evaluate how they compare.

1. The Scientist’s Best Place to Work Survey Opens
Annual surveys allow employees to rank their workplace – and be heard.
The Scientist, magazine of the life sciences, is hosting its 8th
annual Best Places to Work
(BPTW) surveys. Last month, The Scientist opened all three surveys in the series – Academic,
Industry and Postdocs. Make sure to be heard and contribute your opinion to 2010 results at
www.bptw.org.
How have Bay area organizations fared in the surveys? In the Best Places to Work (BPTW) in
Industry surveys, Genomic Health and Exelixis have placed high -- but other leading biotech
organizations in the area have not.
US companies who consistently rank in the top 10 of the BPTW Industry survey outside of the
local area include Tec Laboratories in Albany, OR, Infinity Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, MA,
Pioneer Hi-Bred in Johnston, IA, and Amgen in Thousand Oaks, CA.
Internationally, The Scientist has reported that industry leaders AstraZeneca and
GlaxoSmithKline in London, England and Roche and Novartis in Basel, Switzerland have been
ranked highly by their employees.
This year’s BPTW Industry survey also found that companies who are at the top of the
rankings provide their employees with a sense of security in today’s risky economic climate.
Employees also appreciated a casual, flat organizational structure and the ability to do cutting
edge research by maintaining ties to the wider world of academic science.
In the 2009 BPTW Postdocs Survey, local institutions J. David Gladstone Institute in San
Francisco and Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore were ranked the 3rd and 5th
best
places.
In the 2008 BPTW Academia survey, Gladstone was a leader once again ranking 1st
.
Academics cited job satisfaction and compensation as positives and tenure and research
resources as negatives. The University of California, San Francisco came in at 12th
place with
noted strengths being pay and tenure.
Professionals working in life science and institution leaders around the world count on The
Scientist’s independent survey results to gauge how their workplaces rate. Surveys assess the
work environment including management, research opportunities, job satisfaction, pay,
advancement, benefits and other factors.
How do you rank your employer? Some find positions rewarding; others do not. Where do you
fall in the spectrum? And how is the economy affecting your career? Empowered or
powerless? Your quality of life?
As a token of appreciation for their time, respondents are also eligible to win one of three $250
Amazon.com gift cards. Rank your workplace today at http://www.bptw.org by November
15th
. And make sure to let your colleagues know that the survey is open – the more responses,
the better the results.
For more information on the survey methodology, analysis of results, profiles of companies and
to the full results of all 3 surveys over the last 7 years, visit www.the-scientist.com/bptw.