To date, we’ve experienced a year of mega-mergers with six of the top pharmaceutical players combining forces to become three major contenders. What does this mean for the affected employees and managers alike? Well, believe it or not, it can lead to employment opportunities and personal successes that otherwise may not have been considered.

Sales and revenue growth are stalled at many companies in a variety of industries. As a result, these firms have frozen or reduced laboratory budgets and in some cases have reduced laboratory staffing levels. There are several ways laboratory managers can effectively respond to these situations.

Outsourcing laboratory work is usually done on the assumption that another laboratory is able to perform the work more cheaply and/or more rapidly while maintaining adequate quality of the results. Laboratory managers must study other laboratories to determine if this assumption is correct before outsourcing work to them.

In tough economic times many companies slash their training budgets, thinking that training is expendable. This, according to the author, is ill-advised. Training is not an expense to be minimized; it is an investment that pays dividends by helping workers do their jobs more effectively so that they can positively impact a company's bottom line.

For most laboratories, turnover is low and tenures are high, so the opportunity and necessity to conduct interviews is limited. But, when it's necessary, the author argues that behavioral event interviews work best because the questioning format requires on-the-spot self-analysis that is difficult to prepare for except through life experiences.

So far, nearly 5,000 grants totalling over $1 billion have been awarded by NIH. Most have been awarded to research labs at large universities and small colleges, while some have been awarded to small, privately owned research and product development companies.