Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as an air quality chemist and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.

An air quality chemist is responsible for evaluating the quality of air and find out the types of contaminants present and their concentration. He/she does this by conducting quantitative and qualitative physical and chemical analysis on the samples taken by applying various techniques and procedures using the right instruments.

Duties in this position include evaluating air quality by performing analysis to determine, identify and separate air contaminants; evaluating and interpreting analytical results; setting up, operating and calibrating laboratory equipment as well as making minor adjustments and repairs; maintaining the quality assurance program by analyzing samples from other air quality laboratories; preparing the standards for gas and liquid calibration; ordering and maintaining the inventory of supplies and laboratory equipment as well as preparing reagents and chemical solutions.

Core Skills Required to be an Air Quality Chemist

Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.

Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.

An air quality chemist should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.

Troubleshooting:

Troubleshooting is solving a problem or determining a question to an issue which is often applied to repairing failed products or processes on a machine or a system.

An Air Quality Chemist must be able to diagnose any trouble in the management flow caused by a failure of any kind and determine to remedy the causes of the symptoms with the final product being the confirmation that the solution restores the process to an excellent working state.

Giving Feedback:

Giving Feedback is one of the most powerful tools to develop employees and improve performance through honest feedback of the work done best and areas that need improvement.

An Air Quality Chemist should be skilled in giving out both praise and criticism in a wise way to occasionally show workers where they need to improve and providing them with an observer's insight into the progress of their performance.

Empathy:

Empathy is the understanding of another person's condition from their perspective by placing yourself in their shoes and feeling what they are feeling.

An Air Quality Chemist ought to practice empathy with his staff by learning to be a good listener and understanding what his employees are going through and choosing to feel it with them through the use of imagination and accommodate them.

Self Awareness:

Self Awareness is the ability to have a sound understanding of who you are as a person and how to relate to the world in which you live by understanding your strengths and weaknesses and how to manage them in the workplace.

An Air Quality Chemist must creatively know how to administer the workforce diversity by understanding the culture identity, biases, and stereotypes and become more aware on how he reflects his thoughts, feelings, and behavior towards the staff.

Following Directions:

Following Directions is the skill of carefully considering the given instructions and following them closely without fail.

An Air Quality Chemist must ensure that his workers are paying attention and listening to instructions provided as well as taking careful steps in doing what they are supposed to do and understand what it means to the business and bring satisfaction to their superiors.

Persistence:

Persistence is the refusal to give up or let go of a firm or obstinate continuous course of action despite difficulties or opposition that you may face.

An Air Quality Chemist should strongly emphasize the need for persistence as the fundamental difference between a successful outcome and a failed one while developing this important quality in each creating happy employees and business.

Personal Drive:

Personal Drive is a combination of desire and energy in its simplest form directed at achieving a goal in whatever you have set your heart to accomplish.

An Air Quality Chemist needs to creatively design ways that drive the staff to carry out their work without wasting time by helping them understand and develop their self-motivation skills that assist them to take control of many different viewpoints of their life.

Goal and Objective Setting:

Goal and Objective Setting is the strategic plan that is set and laid down identifying how goals should be accomplished, by who and by what time.

An Air Quality Chemist must detect and schedule each employee's goals, strategy, and objectives and keep motivating them to ensure all of them are met within the set time bringing growth to both the company and the employee.

Business Ethics:

Business Ethics is the ability to learn what is right and wrong in the world of business and choosing to do what is right at all times.

An Air Quality Chemist must emulate good business ethic that is essential for the long-term success of an organization by implementing an ethical program that will foster a thriving entrepreneurial culture while increasing profitability and personal maturity.

Technology Savvy:

Technology Savvy is the introduction of the digital technology in the workplace as a strategy to make tasks run swiftly against doing them manually.

An Air Quality Chemist must ensure that the technology he introduces to the workplace integrated seamlessly with the workflow and empowers the users rather than complicates and damages the workflow making sure the employees are well prepared and not overwhelmed with the technology.

Hard Skills Required to be an Air Quality Chemist

Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.

Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.

An air quality chemist should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.

Air Quality Chemist: Hard skills list

Aptitude for and Interest in Chemistry
Analytical and Problem-Solving
Budgeting
Chemistry
Commercial and business awareness
Computer Savvy
Communication
Cost-effective production methods
Equipment inspection
Estimating production costs
Interpersonal
IT
Finance
Heat Transfer
Hydraulics
Designing Plant and Equipment Configuration
Designing, Installing and Commissioning New Production Plants
Distillation
MS Excel
Mass & Energy balances
Material and Energy Balance
Mathematics
Monitoring and Optimizing the Performance of Production Processes
Operations Analysis
Operation And Control
Optimizing Production
Oral and Written Communication
Planning
Practical aptitude
Principles from Economics, Biochemistry, Statistics and Material Science
Process Control
Project Management
Quality Control Analysis
Researching and Developing Products
Resource Management
Researching New Products
Setting Up Scale-up and Scale-down Processes
Science
Systems Evaluation
System Analysis and Synthesis Techniques
Technology Design
Technical Sales
Time Management
Troubleshooting
Understanding of Engineering Principles and Mathematics

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