Best advice I can offer (having hired and trained many in the field over the past decades): Get a job in industry to learn on the job (hands-on training) using a variety of different instrument brands, types, models and modes. Any type of bench job which provides you the opportunity to develop methods and work with real samples to solve problems. This is the only true way to gain practical experience with real-world compounds. Courses are great for learning the fundamentals, key concepts and learning new systems (something that few spend the needed time to learn and having professional assistance will save a tremendous amount of time), but you will never gain enough practical experience working at school, reading books or just taking more classes. From a hiring perspective, we want individuals with actual experience from industry, not university. If you want to go far with your career and expand your knowledge and skills, start working in industry early on and you have a better opportunity to learn. Diversity of experience is the key as there are many different skills to learn. Keep learning!

Best advice I can offer (having hired and trained many in the field over the past decades): Get a job in industry to learn on the job (hands-on training) using a variety of different instrument brands, types, models and modes. Any type of bench job which provides you the opportunity to develop methods and work with real samples to solve problems. This is the only true way to gain practical experience with real-world compounds. Courses are great for learning the fundamentals, key concepts and learning new systems (something that few spend the needed time to learn and having professional assistance will save a tremendous amount of time), but you will never gain enough practical experience working at school, reading books or just taking more classes. From a hiring perspective, we want individuals with actual experience from industry, not university. If you want to go far with your career and expand your knowledge and skills, start working in industry early on and you have a better opportunity to learn. Diversity of experience is the key as there are many different skills to learn. Keep learning!

One application is metabolic profiling -

Birmingham University has a MOOC and both Birmingham and Imperial run hands on metabolic profiling courses using LC- and GC-MS

Other suggestions career-wise would be forensic toxicology

(Van Bocxlaer JF, Clauwaert KM, Lambert WE, Deforce DL, Van den Eeckhout EG, De Leenheer AP. Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry in forensic toxicology. Mass Spectrom Rev. 2000 Jul-Aug;19(4):165-214. Review. PubMed PMID: 10986692.

or the Pharma Industry - see 19 applications of LC_MS in the Pharma industry by Leon Zhou (2005) DOI: 10.1016/S0149-6395(05)80063-7

You should join with an R&D lab where analytical instruments are heavily used.

Also, industrial setting can be a good idea if you want to develop your career in industry.

Here in the US, PhD programs combine significant practical learning and formal education. Graduates are expected to publish 3-5 peer-reviewed articles, many people produce more. Upon completion, new PhDs either 1) enter industry as senior research scientists to progress toward research or management tracks, or 2) to pursue research opportunity and professorship in academia/national resource labs.

The main difference between getting a PhD or industrial lab job after masters, is money and career dreams. More school mean less income for additional 5 years, but if you want to be a professor there is no other ways. Learning on the job is great, if mentors are good, scientific literature is accessible, and career aspirations are modest.

I agree with Elena Romanova and William Letter that nothing beats real life practice. A course is useful for teaching you the fundamentals, but will make more sense if you are then applying them in real life. Whether you go for a job in industry or for a PhD is up to you, but make sure you check that you will actually be allowed to use the instruments yourself - many labs have only one or two dedicated operators and everyone else is dependent on them.

Thank you all for the comments! I already have a small 2+ years hands on experience with LC-MS/MS. I always had a supervisor to ask questions to but I have noticed that my questions were always better answered by my professors than the first MS operator/supervisors at the lab.

For example, when asking if it is possible to predict whether ACN or MeOH will work better as mobile phase, the supervisors told me: Just test both then you know. And the professor explained how and why until the very detail.

Also, unfortunately I have experienced that in labs, no one is interested in the hardcore fundamentals but rather focus on high troughput and high speed measuring because of money reasons. No one is interested in why a method does not work or why changing certain things in the method improves it. They just follow a protocol to test for stuff and continue if it improves without further investigation. William Letter Jennifer Kirwan Elena V Romanova Udaya Jayasundara Elaine Holmes

Hi Asal,

I'm sorry to hear that has been your experience in labs. Most labs I have worked in have put heavy emphasis on both understanding the theory behind the practice and in method development. Possibly then the advice is to find a lab to work in that is applicable to your needs.