Hello, I recently graduated from a University in the USA in Bioinformatics with a bachelors. As I am looking at different jobs I see Bioinformatics Techs and Bioinformatics Scientists and I am trying to understand the difference. Its clear that Scientist get paid much better, but what skills do they have that techs don't? Is it just a difference between a Bachelors or Masters? Or is it that scientist head projects and come up with novel ideas where as technicians just do what they are told? Sorry if this is obvious I would be greatly appreciative for so information on this. Thanks
In my experience, it's just semantics. I see positions advertised as technicians, scientists, and specialists that share the same duties. In many of the cases, it just depends what HR at an organization decided to classify the job, which does have quite an impact on salary, benefits, etc. I would say that I've seen the 'scientist' title applied more often to positions that require a MS or PhD and require a more specialized skill set, but it doesn't appear to be universal.
I don't even see any bioinformatics tech positions anymore and I have been in the job market recently. I usually see a position with similar responsibilities advertised as a Bioinformatician/Bioinformatics Programmer in academia and Bioinformatics Scientist/Associate Scientist in the industry. Both positions require the candidate to do a variety of tasks from the menial like file format conversions and running pipelines to the more advanced like setting up novel workflows in cases where there isn't an existing solution.
