Pros
The team on which I worked was really great, and everyone had a very strong sense of camaraderie. I was initially somewhat skeptical about the Professional Staffing Services model and I came here looking for some sense of what I was getting into.
First off, while Eurofins is a rapidly growing company, Lancaster itself (within Eurofins) takes a great deal of interest in its employees, and has everyone fly out to Lancaster PA for a week of on-site training. On the one hand, or anyone with a good deal of experience, much of this might feel a bit redundant, especially with site specific training that will occur in addition. However, while every company pays a great deal of lip service to integrity (by necessity), I would honestly say that I was actually impressed by the sincerity with which the ideals are expressed by Lancaster, as this is the core of their business model.
With regard to the rest of the work experience, I was fortunate to have a terrific manager in my time with Lancaster, and the team she managed had really excellent rapport. The nice thing about the PSS model is that as they are vending your services, they really take a serious interest in your professional development. In many experiences I've had in other companies (which have ranged from start-ups to multinational blue chips to everything in between, both for profit and non-profit), there can be at times an adversarial relationship between people in the lab and their managers. This was in no way a part of my experience with the PSS model, because they really want you to be happy, they want you to be productive, and they want the service you deliver to reflect well on their organization. This makes it very much a win-win situation. I felt very much appreciated for the work I did, far more so than for any of my other positions held. And I felt good about the work that I did, such that is made me actually quite happy with my life in general, so much so that my wife was rather sad when I left this job (due to forces far beyond the control of anyone whom I knew directly), as this job did so much to make me feel happy and productive. I produced some of the best work I've done here, in large part for the simple reason that the effort was recognized and rewarded. It is an incredible thing when you really have that, and it's the sort of thing for which you generally dare not hope.
Cons
The major downside is navigating the IT aspects, as Eurofins Lancaster has to deal with employees at client sites all over the world with different levels of IT security and different such security protocols at the client sites. Given that technical work already has so much redundant and tedious bureaucratic wrangling to deal with (by FDA necessity), this just adds another layer. However, I would state that this got much better in the time I was with the company, and this will likely continue to improve in the coming year.
