Making Our Presence Known

The ACS fall national meeting is being held this week in Boston, and the full range of activities associated with a national meeting is well under way. More than 9,000 technical presentations and posters, governance activities, social events, and the exposition have attracted more than 14,000 chemists to Boston.

One of the significant activities at the Boston meeting is the public unveiling of the reinvented ACS website. The new website, more than three years in the making, has not yet gone live; that happens on Sept. 30. However, in Boston, ACS members are getting their first look at the design, navigation, functionality, and overall operation of the website that will replace the redoubtable chemistry.org.

The operational designation for this Release 1.0 of the new ACS website has been "findability." As serviceable as chemistry.org has been for the past decade, in survey after survey and informal conversation after informal conversation, members and other users of chemistry.org have told us that the major drawback of the site has been an inability to find information, even information that they know is there.

While the new site has a pleasing, attractive, and consistent look and feel, the real work that has gone into creating it has been the extensive information architecture analysis of ACS content and how members and other users access and use that content. The data from this work have been used to create a logical and coherent structure for the site from the home page through landing pages, transition pages, and article pages.

The new site groups information and services into 10 content categories to create a universal navigation that is consistent across the entire site. An improved search function will also greatly aid users in their ability to find the content they are looking for.

One of the content categories on the universal navigation bar is "Careers," which leads a user to the new "ACS Careers" page. With the launch of the new website, users will also find a "Careers" button on the universal navigation bar on C&EN Online, replacing the familiar "Chemjobs" button.

The ACS Careers page is an important new collaboration between C&EN Chemjobs and the ACS Department of Career Management & Development. ACS Careers collects all of the extensive ACS career resources—including C&EN Online classified advertising, career consultants and workshops, articles, surveys and statistics, and the ACS salary comparator—on a single landing page with a user-centric design that caters to our members.

We believe that ACS Careers will be the definitive site for ACS members to manage their careers and find high-quality jobs. Between Jan. 1, 2006, and July 31, 2007, almost 2,500 employers registered with Chemjobs, and these employers will immediately be part of the ACS Careers Job Bank. More than 1,200 of those employers posted 4,227 positions on Chemjobs. Those were real jobs in chemistry. The vast majority of Chemjobs postings are for 30 days, so the jobs you've seen on Chemjobs and the jobs you will be seeing at ACS Careers are current.

The employers registered on Chemjobs represent the entire chemical enterprise: 546 academe, 1,154 industry, 132 government, 148 nonprofit, and 490 small chemical businesses employing 500 or fewer total employees. These small businesses, as job seekers are well aware, are often the innovation leaders that are creating new jobs for chemists, many of them at the interfaces of chemistry and related disciplines.

ACS Careers epitomizes what Director of ACS Web Strategy Melody Voith has set as her goal in reinventing the ACS Web presence: A website where the organizational silos that divide ACS operational units are invisible to the user.

In managing your career, you don't care where the job listings come from, who manages the career fair at national meetings, or who gathers and analyzes the employment statistics that are so vital to you. C&EN and the Department of Career Management & Development have created a single website that delivers all of that and more to you.

Thanks for reading.