laboratory analyst

health screener

postdoctoral researcher

microbiologist

IEH Laboratories & Consulting Group

This role supported a major food industry customer as a third-party pathogen testing lab. It's a skeleton crew operation that runs 24/7 with 12h shifts. Everyone is overworked and frustrated. You are literally on your feet the whole day going from task to task, nonstop, with very little division of labor. You're the sampler, extractionist, microbiologist, data analyst, courier, shipping dept, customer service rep, and janitor. You get to do it all. It's like running your own business except it's not yours, and the wage is paltry. Some of the sampling work is heavy requiring 50lb lifting.

The experience is actually pretty solid as far as repetitively doing manual PCR and agar plating non-stop for 12 hours along with gel analysis. That said, I hated my life when I worked here and the 2-week rotating shift. The pay and benefits were weak. Sick days and vacation are all combined into about 7 days a year that you have to accrue each pay period. The incubated samples smell like a dumpster on a summer afternoon. It's a very laborious, smelly, underpaid role. 

I only recommend this job if you need microbiology experience and like working yourself to death for low pay and very mediocre benefits (including non-matching 401k). Aside from that, it's extremely casual, and your labmates suffer with you. Everyone suffers, remote managers abuse you if you mess up, and onsite managers hate their life. It apparently isn't much different at headquarters in Seattle. IEH runs a very cheap, lean, and resultantly toxic operation. Employee safety is an afterthought, remote managers don't talk or have meetings with you, and, technology-wise, it's like working in a late 90s/early 2000s lab. Very outdated. No shared WIFI either even though it's only 5-6 employees per shift and the wireless routers are active. Truly a miserable experience.

I was ashamed to work here and didn't talk about the job much. Get your experience, work one year and promptly exit. That's what corporate wants. You're expendable, and the more the door rotates, the lower the wages will remain. IEH is a cost leader and can outbid almost anyone in this space. This is how you do it: shoestring operations and single-wide dingy modular labs. Welcome to IEH

Unprofessional Management & Favoritism: Management does not enforce company policies equitably and very clearly has favorites; rules are applied subjectively based on favoritism. Furthermore, leadership actively compromises workplace morale by participating in and encouraging a culture of gossip regarding specific staff members. Communication boundaries are also routinely crossed, including receiving hostile, aggressive work-related messages outside of scheduled working hours.
• Explicit Lack of Upward Mobility: Career advancement is non-existent, a fact openly acknowledged by leadership. During my initial interview, the manager, explicitly stated, "There is no room for advancement here because the next promotion would be my job."
• Critical Operational & Scheduling Failures: There is a total absence of a reliable shift coverage or contingency plan. When staffing gaps occur, management fails to provide support, routinely leaving individual employees entirely unassisted to manage high-volume laboratory operations alone .
• Unsustainable Work Environment: The combination of rigid, high-pressure expectations and a lack of adequate coverage creates severe burnout.
Advice to Management:
Establish professional boundaries, cease engaging in workplace politics and gossip, and implement an equitable standard for policy enforcement. Operational scheduling must be overhauled to ensure adequate shift coverage so that employees are not left managing high volume shifts isolated. Finally, leadership should respect standard off-clock boundaries to mitigate high turnover.

Worked at IEH for a couple years and everything was fine until new management came in. Management changed in March but management did not show up to the lab until June. Worked as manager for those few months, worked 12 hours a day for 5-6 days a week. Coworkers that were there at the time helped out. Once the new manager finally came in, they took credit for any good praise that we as a lab did. Then he would show up for two hours and then be tired and go home leaving everyone with just as much work if not more. Told me not to train the new people coming in so I did not and I was seeing that they weren’t being trained and would notice that they would just sit meanwhile the people who had been working there were constantly being overwhelmed with work. When I was there, manager would only yell at women because manager would feel superior. Manager always threatened to write up the women but when men would make a mistake, they would not get any consequences. Women in the lab would always clean the lab meanwhile the men would never help or be pushed to help. Tried to tell upper management and HR and nothing was getting done. If you’re favored by upper management and HR, you’ll thrive in this company as nothing happens to you. 

Good place to start if you get good training. There are a plethora of test methods that are done and you will gain experience but with the current manager there I would avoid working here especially if you are a woman. 



The work environment in this lab was stressful, cliquey, and hostile. Multiple analysts were berated and treated as unintelligent for simple things like asking for help when needed. At one point as a new employee I was also berated for taking extra time to process an order of 100+ samples by myself while nothing was done to assist me. During training we were told we’d be expected to drive an unmarked white van to various locations to pick up samples.  This was not mentioned at all in interviews or the job description at the time.

The lab director was unprofessional regarding how they spoke about subordinate staff. They were also poor at offering support and conflict resolution. As a new employee, I was expected to train other new hires for the entire workday while performing my own job at the same efficiency. Management never acknowledged or showed appreciation for tasks like these or when other analysts went beyond their regular job duties to be helpful.

The work itself was fairly repetitive, uninteresting, and often disgusting. The pay was mediocre for a company that expects applicants with bachelor’s degrees. There was essentially no career ladder. As such, there is nothing about this company that makes it worth picking over any other similar lab tech job. There is a reason why turnover is so high. 

This position is ideal as an entry level job for a recent college graduate in the microbiology field. It has given me valuable experience in testing and analysis procedures. However, it quickly became boring once I became familiar with the procedures and the other ins-and-outs of the lab since everything was repetitive and I performed the same analyses on one set of samples. Also, expect to work A LOT of overtime (48-50 hour weeks will likely be the norm). Because the lab is so small, whoever ends up becoming the full-time employee will likely only have one part-time employee to help them two days out of the week. Thus, by default, the full-time employee at this lab will also be the lab manager (even though the job title likely won't include a "manager" designation). There may be potential growth with IEH as a whole, but not with this particular position since you will be the manager of the lab. All in all, this job is a good fit for someone just starting out in the microbiology field to gain useful experience, but I wouldn't recommend staying with it more than one or two years because of the workload and overall work environment.

The pay is abysmal for them requiring trained scientists. The hours are lousy, but that comes with almost all quality control positions. Your immediate manager might be awesome, but everyone above them is in the Pacific north west and they NEVER pay for repairs and new equipment. It ends up feeling like the managers don't mind throwing underpaid bodies at problems instead of actually investing in the company and its employees. Almost all of my coworkers either got their experience there and left in a year, or they stayed longer while working on a second degree to try to find a better job. It is not a place to stay, but if you need the experience, you can get through this meat grinder for a year. At least you're working with other young people and cracking jokes. Also, there's no room for advancement, so it's not like the pay gets better.

What is the best part of working at the company?
The flexibility of the schedule. There was always someone willing to cover your shift if you needed it.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
The people. They're all incredibly young and love to start drama with each other. It was exhausting.

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
Toxic. Everyone is there to trash talk each other.

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
It largely depends on who you are. 

If you're teacher's pet, you'll show up late, with Starbucks in hand, complaining about your life while doing nothing work related. If you're not teacher's pet, you'll have to do your job and theirs too. Which consists of getting labels, bags and media ready for incoming samples. Once the samples are received, you'll label them in order and enrich them with media. Then it's off to the back to make more media, unless there's aliquoting to do.

I worked here for a few years and witnessed a lot of mismanagement from an analyst perspective. Within a week of starting the lab manager was fired and was never rehired. Instead, the duties of the manager were either thrust on the analysts, delegated to a lab manager who worked at a location >4 hours away or not done at all. The client turnover was high and as a result there were intense busy periods where each employee was working OT, and periods of extremely low sample numbers to the point where analysts were sent home early or even let go. The company depends on overworking analysts, so they will always understaff their labs and overwork employees until no one is able to provide coverage for one another. Because of low oversight there were also some HR-type issues that made it really unpleasant to work there; maybe this is resolved now that they have more employees at the location, not sure.

What is the best part of working at the company?
Work was simple. Nothing complex.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
The number of samples you will receive is unsustainable with the number of employees. You will have days where you are processing 300 split samples by yourself, and that's just one customer

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
Most employees keep to themselves and are easy to work with. However almost everyone has left since I was there. Things do not change no matter how bad it is

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
Just overworked and understaffed. There are too many samples to process, incubate, perform PCR analysis, and perform microbiology analysis on top of receiving more samples, cleaning and maintaining a good work environment, making media, cleaning bottles, and making agarose gel.

The management micromanages your work from the other side of the country, with great concern for minutiae meant to impress the clients on the paperwork, but a complete lack of care about conditions in the local lab. The people working the labs locally are good, but this doesn't make up for the fact that pay is horrendous for the amount of work and requirements to do it, and the upper management exists solely to make their lives harder from afar.

Do not approach this job as a step forward in a career, only do it if you really need the money. The company makes plenty of money but pays its employees dirt wages, and if you want to gain lab experience it would be far better to intern with a researcher or university, or just continue with education.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Laboratory analyst 14 salaries reported	$24.71 per hour
Health screener 9 salaries reported	$31.35 per hour
Postdoctoral researcher 7 salaries reported	$76,500 per year
Microbiologist 3 salaries reported	$22.00 per hour

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