animal care specialist

technologist

research assistant

senior research assistant

scientist

The Jackson Laboratory

When I started working at the lab near a decade ago you would get smiles and a friendly greeting as you walked the halls. You worked together as a team to accomplish tasks, there were days we worked hard, but you’d feel you accomplished something.  Recently people are more concerned with themselves.  No one enjoys working there anymore. upper management has spent thousands of dollars on taking these gallop internal poles to find out why people are unhappy. I’ve been on both sides of those poles. I’ve taken the polls as a technician been graded as a supervisor but nothing applies to upper management because it’s seen as infallible  like they can do no wrong.  


They  set outlandish expectations having no idea if it’s possible to achieve nor do they care because everyone is easily replaced so turnover is extremely high. The only job I’ve ever had on which I’ve witnessed people quit after one da or a couple of days. They are out of touch and have no idea what is required in  any department they stare at numbers on a computer screen, but never spend time with the actual employees, their supervisors or their work areas to actually experience the workload. What  this creates is a culture  in which people  do a job because they’re in fear of losing it versus them doing the job because they enjoy it. It forces people to cut corners and take short cuts because they’re still expected to complete all their tasks. . They feign caring  for their emoloyees  but in reality your just a number to them.  The favoritism shown and the length they go to cover it up are  sickening.  

Management is fine with people not being properly trained they say they want people trained but then, when you dig deep,  you have people doing things improperly and those people are training others  you realize that no one in the lab knows how to do their position properly. They place people in positions they aren’t qualified for through no fault of their own. They never recieve  proper training even when requested. The training they do recieve is by fellow technicians who might or might not know themselves the standards. Which again is no fault of theirs. They are very few there that know the how to do the positions from bottom to the top. Inquire with upper  management and they’ll defer you to someone because they just assume that person knows but actually doesn’t. They’ll expect things that they themselves have zero idea what the process is and don’t seem to care. They’ll make demands and you’re expected to make that happen even when it’s not physically possible. 
Upper  management places, the unhappiness of technicians on  the shoulders of the supervisors and leads just like they dump everything else on those positions too. Knowing full well none of them
in management have completed that type of work, or would have a clue on how to complete that type of work. 

I worked in many  professional settings I’ve worked for all kinds of management, owner, CEOs, etc. and you have those that verbally and actively tell you to cheat or take shortcuts to get things completed. I’ve worked for many  who  knew you couldn’t complete it but they turn a  blind eye, taking shortcuts. At the lab you have  management that has no idea what’s going on because they make themselves so out of touch when things do go wrong it won’t be them. Knowing they will never  be held accountable for it. they have long drawn out meetings, telling middle management, how to improve the environment and middle  management knows that there’s nothing they can do because it’s upper management and their ineptitude  that creates the poor working environment. 
You might ask yourself why doesn’t somebody question this or bring this up to someone because when you do your labeled unprofessional or you’re just shunned because God forbid that you point out mistakes  that upper management makes,  it won’t be long till you’re out of a job.

Jax with the science trying to find a cure for multiple ailments in the world just commendable, and I found pride working there because of that. Thats how they sell you to keep you working. When you see the disparaging way they treat certain departments and coddle others but don’t dare bring your concerns to them.   The upper management   at the Sacramento lab can’t take a look in the mirror and realize that they might need to change the enviorment starting with themselves. 
Oh, and don’t ever share ideas or point out things that you might have witnessed or experienced in your previous employment,  they are the  authority and youre not qualified for that. 

The pay  is good the benefits are good the work is fulfilling. I feel like you’re making a difference and you can see that in real time. However, the Jackson Laboratory in Sacramento has lost or thrown away so many great people that could’ve been part of something bigger, but will never know. 

reviews are based on just checklist so if you’re proficient in something you can get a decent raise but if you’re not a team player or you only complete just yours and not the shared   work, stand around and watch everybody else work harder yeah you’ll get a decent raise but everybody around you hates working with you, but those are the people  that advanced those are the people that get raises because it’s all based on a checklist of favoritism  and not the observations of the people you work directly  with. The amount of the raise is not based on your performance appraisil upper management has to approve the increase and can divvy it up to whom they personally feel is more deserving.
Your targeted if you questions why certain SOPs are able to be side stepped or ignored all together. While others of the same level of importance are strictly enforced. They seem to adjust enforcement based on you silence or compliance. They point out people to be labeled as which to start searching for procedures to discipline them for. Or they’ll just use generic,, vague all encompassing terms like “performance issue” certain people that they no longer want. 

They want a “Yes man”  if you voice your concerns in  any way youre labeled as unprofessional. I 
Ioved working there until I discovered how horribly toxic upper management is.  There no one there to check their behavior  it’s a good ol boys & girls club. Everyone in upper management all know each other and are all beholden to one another so if one or more of them are toxic it’s not dealt with because it’ll look poorly inventor the other. HR is  not is ineffective because they it’s much easier to terminate an employee than to start documenting a member of management. 
The feeling your left with when you loved your job but the top made it more and more toxic by the day and your left with no recourse.
You do what you’re ethically and morally obligated to do and then you become a target. 



I have worked in laboratory animal care for over thirty years, and I have never worked as hard as I do at JAX. Physically and mentally. The training takes months and wore me out. But as I have settled into the job, I have come to love it. For me, that is. Most people I know would honestly hate it. 

All day on your feet. The tasks require extended periods of concentration - can get very boring but a lapse of concentration can lead to a mistake that will be recorded and can affect your chance of promotion. Lots of counting, data entry for every cage, repetitive small motions that can easily lead to injury, work that MUST be done every week regardless of staff being out sick. So it can be very stressful. 

That all makes it sound bad, I know. But yet I love my job - so why?  I like Standard Operating Procedures. I like knowing exactly what is expected of me. I like doing important work that needs to be done. I actually thrive on repetition - it is my comfort zone. After the initial three-month training where I was learning too much too fast and it was leaving me frazzled, I settled in to doing what I had learned, with opportunities to learn more advanced things when I felt ready to do so. It is a large company with room for moving from area to area to find a good fit for yourself. 

The hardest part of the job to me is people. People are the hardest part of anything to me, and in a JAX animal room you are surrounded by them. Drama is hard to avoid. I have luckily found a supervisor who “gets” me and with whom I can discuss issues openly, who will help me work on my own reactions and will intervene with others when absolutely necessary. I suspect that people’s experiences at the company vary drastically based on their immediate supervisor. 

The part of the job that is both a blessing and a curse is being rated constantly on a series of “metrics”. How many cages you change per hour, how many mice you wean per day, how many samples you send for genotyping, how many mice you pack for shipping… everything is recorded and quantified. And caught on camera!  This is a benefit for accountability, and everyone works very hard to get a lot done and maintain good metrics. But it leads people to not want to help with any chores that are not recorded.  So in a way your job rating goes down when you help solve a problem for someone else or clean up the work area or even stop to discuss a potential problem with management. And it leads to a tug-of-war between wanting to do things fast and wanting to do them right. 

The metrics policy does mostly stop a problem that was rampant in other jobs I’ve been in - namely, promotion of social butterflies who schmooze with management while not doing much work. 

Another thing I appreciate at JAX is that to get a promotion, you have to first learn and show competence in the tasks of the new position. This can be frustrating, as you might work months to accomplish the goals necessary for the promotion. But it avoids another problem rampant in other companies - people being promoted into positions that they are not capable of actually doing.

The vacation and sick leave policies are very generous. Work hours are flexible within given parameters   Salary is very good for the Ellsworth area. Health benefits are not the best I have experienced, and premiums and deductibles keep rising (which is not the company’s fault - talk to the MAGAs), but they are at least comparable to those of other companies in the area. 

When I started here back in 2018 I felt like I landed a dream job. The pay was great, the training was thorough and hands on and I looked forward to coming to work everyday. I was always learning something new, I loved my team and I looked forward to advancing in the company. When the pandemic hit, everything went downhill. Management really let the ball drop. Hard. There is mandatory OT every week. Work can start as early as 3:30am and sometimes you won't walk out the door until 2pm. They set high quotas for the techs to meet that then create an incredibly stressful work environment. Large numbers of daily call outs and non stop turnover of techs makes for limited staffing and even more work for the rest of the teams. Growth opportunity is close to zero. Once hired on as a trainee you have two guaranteed opportunities for promotion as long as you meet the requirements. After that there are three more positions before you hit the ceiling. For those positions you have to wait until the position is available and then you are competing for one open position against dozens of others who are also qualified to apply. Your growth is also heavily dependent on your lead and supervisor. If they like you, they will help you advance. If they don't, they will make it nearly impossible for promotion, going as far as delaying or denying you opportunities to meet the needed requirements. For new hires, most job positions are complicated and require you to learn a large variety of skills. This process takes a few months to understand and master. It used to be a 12 week training program with your trainer in a training room. Since JAX is so short staffed, new hires have been given a crash course in training and then pushed out of the training room to their new permanent rooms to finish up training by whoever has time to teach you. They loose valuable knowledge and assistance from the training program and therefore they are ill prepared for the work required of them. Because of this, senior techs have to pick up the extra work that the new hires can't do yet. Everyone is beyond exhausted and management doesn't listen. For a few months and on occasion, multiple techs were working 6 days a week. Multiple complaints have been brought up to management only to be brushed off, dismissed, or given promises of change that never come. Up until the pandemic the pay was very fair. Once they started to increase hours and job responsibilities with no pay increase or promotion to justify our additional responsibilities, it is common to feel incredibly overworked and underpaid. With the pay increase for new hires, there is only a dollar difference between new hires and some base level techs who have been here for years. Many techs have met the requirements for promotions and yet have been waiting for months for the promotions to happen due to Covid delays. 

The job itself is standard security work with an extra emphasis on customer service for a lab of generally cordial staff, and that in and of itself is great for experience and not terribly difficult work, especially for the pay and benefits. What is an unforgivable sin is the combination of simultaneously stubborn or obtuse behaviors from management toward the officers, but a totally jelly-boned attitude toward other departments demanding that Security pick up the slack for them. Management will talk out both sides of their mouth, claiming that we should be helpful when other departments request assistance with their work and Security is able to oblige but that we should not "own" those tasks, only to double back and take ownership of those tasks and leave Security on the hook when another department's responsibilities aren't fulfilled. The other unforgiveable sin from management is one supervisor's total inability to foster goodwill and demonstrate leadership capability, leading to overall awful morale. Micromanaging, power politics, distrust, constant attempts to manufacture criticism against the rank and file of regular officers while refusing to take the plank out of their own eye first has led to high turnover; this then enables said supervisor to demonstrate their inability to assess and hire good replacement talent, further degrading trust and morale. This person isn't just the weakest link; they corrode the strength of the entire chain. Under this leadership, no one should look to find long-term work, at least in Bar Harbor.

Almost all upper managers come from an impressive science and research background - NOT an impressive business and management background. They make terrible spending decisions, they have weak leadership skills, and they constantly go barreling into new ideas without properly considering them first. Their inept handling of the Covid-19 crisis has nearly run the Sacramento location into the ground. The animal care staff was already a highly overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated team BEFORE the pandemic. Then their Covid-19 response was to mess around with employees work schedules, add mandatory overtime, and restrict the use of earned vacation time to one day per week per 8-12 people (they gradually increased this limit but you STILL can’t take more than 4 days in a row). When up to 30% of all animal care techs were calling out sick each day and turnover became an absolute nightmare, their only change in approach was to increase hourly pay and offer sign-on bonuses and short-term retention bonuses. It’s basically an expectation that most new hires at this point will quit as soon as they get that last retention bonus. I get it, there was a global pandemic and hindsight is 20/20. But I’m writing this review in March 2022 and this company is still struggling just as much as they were two years ago. Entry level workers are treated like dogs, and a LOT of management energy is wasted on figuring out new ways to restrict, control, and reprimand them, while upper management is literally never held accountable for anything at all.

Not really a place for growth or advancement. Management plays favorites, they'll post opening for supervisors and make people go through multiple interviews and either pick no one or they pick whoever they're already chummy with. Advancement isn't really based on work performance. Each area is supposed to have a supervisor but you're lucky if yours is ever around. If you excel and are organized in your work they'll overload you with more and give you more tasks than you can handle. Be expected to work overtime, and don't be surprised even if you put in overtime throughout the week and your coworkers didn't at all, you'll still be expected to all stay until the same time on Friday because "teamwork" Work hours are ridiculously early for everyone, everyone's grumpy, tired, and injuries are practically unavoidable. The worst part about this job is that they offer the same pay to everyone instead of DOE with minimal chances to increase except with yearly reviews, you can get an exceeds expectations on all aspects of your review and still barely get an increase. With Covid, new hires are coming in with huge bonuses and higher pay. Meanwhile, already disgruntled techs get nothing, and they wonder why everyone is quitting. They make everyone attend meetings where they just spew propaganda about their mission and how great the lab is doing, and offer incentives you don't really have the chance to use. Its great to get a bonus vacation day... that you can't use because taking time off is barely allowed due to short staffing. There aren't really any consequences for bad performance and there isn't an incentive to strive for more. There are some really intelligent and beautifully kind people here that believe in science and work for advancement, but unfortunately the bad outweighs the good.

Management doesn't pay attention or really care about the workers. Supervisors do nothing to help with the labor, and get paid tons of money to sit on their computers all day, but good luck ever becoming one unless you want to slog through 15 years of being treated horribly. Job is very stressful with little reward. They expect you to work extremely hard, as the bare minimum. They will tell you that you can start as an animal care tech and then move to other positions internally if you don't want to work in that field, but most other departments are either not hiring or are very difficult to get into. You kill hundreds of mice a week, as well as see mouse gore on a daily basis, and it takes a mental toll on you. There is no relief from any stress on this job except for a few small quiet "relaxation" rooms around the campus that they might let you hang out in for an hour, every once in a while. Never saw anyone use them because they don't really help at all. Good luck actually using PTO, as it has to be approved by your supervisor, and if your room is understaffed (most of them are) it will very likely be denied. The people above management could care less about the labor workers beyond the numbers they produce. Here's a good example; One of the reward systems they implemented for animal techs shortly before I left, was supposed to reward people who got labelled as going above and beyond in their reviews. This label could only be applied to people who did far more than the rest of the workers in their room. This meant that if everyone worked harder, no one was rewarded. The "reward system" was absolutely just a way for the company to squeeze more work out of their bottom line without having to actually pay for it. I could keep going, but I think this explains enough.

Jackson laboratory is a decent place to get  started in the world of working in a laboratory, but I struggle to find where it’s beneficial other then that. ( I would highly encourage people to start in a clinical lab learning phlebotomy and going that route, much more portable.) The job is a very niche skill that isn’t very portable to other companies and fields. This is not a place to work if you love animals, as euthanasia is an everyday/all day event with some barbaic secondary methods in case primary methods don’t work. The hours start around 5am and go until 3:30, which is alright if you live close, but way too early if you live far. The amount of work expected is very high, and very fast paced and also extremely repetitive and just plain boring. The starting pay is laughable, and they raised it about a dollar and it’s still isn’t anywhere near enough when Taco Bell down the road is hiring for the same pay. The outfit required in the rooms is extremely uncomfortable and makes you sweat like crazy, all while being micromanaged down to the smallest thing, like bathroom breaks and lunch breaks. The training department in Ellsworth is disjointed, unprofessional and incredibly frustrating as they make it super hard to know where your going to be working or what your going to do, and sometimes would send you to the wrong place or never tell you anything at all. Overall, Jackson laboratory helped me realize I never want to work in a laboratory ever again. 

I was working in Animal Care, Breeding services to be exact for about a year. 
Hiring process was horrible. HR is unprofessional and forgetful, rude, commented on my nationality. 
When you start working in AC they put you in training room for 3 months. I was working in Animal Care. 
Hiring process was horrible. HR is unprofessional and forgetful, rude, commented on my nationality. 
The mandatory training (lasts 3 months) is awful. The room management micromanages every single move you make, you can’t even go to the bathroom without asking (you can, but that will upset your trainer and the room supervisor). If you are an okay worker and gave a functioning brain, they will make you pick up slack from the rest of trainees. The promise you very quick promotion with a pretty good pay increase, but that is a lie.  

Upper management  and HR department are full of delusional individuals who have absolutely no idea how hard, horrible and exhausting this job is, and they do not care about any of the real issues. They are too busy figuring out what kind of JAX merchandise to release next. 
I would also like to mention that animals are kept in cages that are as small as possible (to save money, of course). The equipment is faulty, which causes a lot of issues and a lot of dead mice. Upper management refuses to fix these issues because they do not care about animal welfare and they are incredibly cheap. 

My only advice - run. Do not work here, you will regret it. 

A non-profit company with the mission of leading the search for tomorrow's cures. Employees are compensated with decent pay, health benefits, and great retirement plan contribution matching.

In the face of a high turn-over rate (a consequence of poor management and unhelpful HR representatives), the facility has had to resort to bribing people to apply with a $1,000 sign-on bonus. Don't get me wrong, sign-on bonuses are not always a bad thing. But, in this case, it is.

The early stages of your career in Animal Care or Operations will be relatively simple. You learn SOPs, animal science, and feel as though you are making a meaningful contribution to the scientific community. After about one year of working in the aforementioned departments at the lab's Sacramento facility, you begin to see patterns: favoritism, unprofessional conduct between employees, work-related injuries, and unrealistically high work quotas. Leadership is so focused on meeting the bare-minimum requirement of completing weekly husbandry that they are often unable to catch the SOP and animal welfare violations that are happening under their noses. In some cases, they simply do not care anymore.

If you are thinking of applying at The Jackson Laboratory, just keep these things in mind.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Animal care specialist 2 salaries reported	$20.38 per hour
Technologist 15 salaries reported	$26.84 per hour
Research assistant 12 salaries reported	$23.40 per hour
Senior research assistant 21 salaries reported	$59,939 per year
Scientist 4 salaries reported	$106,395 per year

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