The Jackson Laboratory reviews

I love my job and my team. They have been supportive and always been there for me when I am going through life's struggles. I have learned so much here. For me there are not any cons. I hope to be able to work here until I retire, and the retirement plan is great too.

WARNING: This will be long; it is my entire review for this position as someone who just recently quit. I cannot recommend this position for 99% of the people. You must be a robot to perform this job effectively. It’s hardly a surprise that JAX is struggling to fill animal trainee positions. The expectations for the $18/hour position are ludicrous. To begin, work starts at 7 sharp, somewhat early, but no big deal. I lived over an hour away so the commute wasn’t great but there is a shuttle system which works most of the time. The first stages of my job involved training in a mouse room. I learned the basics and spent around 2-3 months in the training room before I was pulled out early due to short staffing in other areas of the lab. (Training is supposed to last 5-6 months) I was then sent to a different area of the lab, switching completely from being in the “production” side where I did all my training to being on the “research” side. This presents a problem, as the way mouse handling works in the research rooms is different than the production rooms. Many basic things are similar but there are also many small, nuanced details that are drastically different than how you might perform them in training. For instance, special types of grain or feed that never get mentioned in production but suddenly become an important factor on the research side. Naturally, after having my training time cut in half, and with the sudden shift from production to research, mistakes were made. Even the tiniest thing such as doing every action in the exact same order is crucial for scientific accuracy. Understandably, not the fault of JAX, that is just how science is and should be conducted. But they do not train you properly to handle these mistakes or to learn these changes until its too late. Once they notice you are making mistakes, they start to keep an eye on you, literally. Each room comes with multiple, giant, swiveling cameras that are crystal clear and can zoom in on the smallest details. I constantly felt the eyes on the back of my head. Most of the time I would watch the camera swivel in my directions whenever I started the workday. It usually stayed that way most of the day because the supervisors have nothing better to do than to watch my every move like some sort of Orwellian gargoyle. I cannot stress how exhausting and anxiety inducing this can be. I found myself constantly worried about how even the tiniest mistake I may have not been trained for could cost me my only source of income. Often, I was making more mistakes because I was so distracted about the fact that I could see the camera following my every move. Imagine someone right behind you, painstakingly watching you work, peering over your shoulder all day, that is how it felt. Making enough mistakes will get you called in for a chat with the supervisor and manager. This can happen at any point in the workday with little to no warning. On most of those occasions I had no idea why I was being called in until I got there. Lemme tell you, they love to make lists. Each meeting ran the same, it was never more than 15 -20 minutes, and they would sit down across from me and hand me a list of infractions that I had committed recently. Some were fair (mistakes I remember making and will admit to) but others were inaccurate or just fabricated all together. I remember one specific instance where the supervisor claimed I was caught “knocking over a trash can and refused to pick it up”. Like what?! I am 100% certain I had never knocked down a trash can at any point. Plus, why wouldn’t I pick it up, who does something like that? I told them that many of the mistakes on their lists were inaccurate or only told half the story, but it did not matter to them. “The other infractions are still there” they would say. Also, since the meeting was only 15 minutes I could never rebuttal or refute any points. The manager and supervisor talked for 12 minutes, gave me maybe 2-3 minutes to respond then they would kick me out. Not nearly enough time to address the number of infractions they seemed to come up with out of thin air. They expected zero mistakes, not even the tiniest little thing which is just not congruent with human nature. Again, you need to be a robot for this job. It's not like I didn’t try either, I directly reached out to my supervisor to find out where I could improve, and I even requested a simple step-by-step guide I could bring to my station of how to properly perform these tasks so I would make less mistakes. I was told they could make me this guide and that it would be emailed to me. I waited patiently. 3 weeks passed with nothing. I had assumed they needed some time to make it but did not think it would take so long. So, the next time I had a meeting with my supervisor I brought up the guide. And guess what? They didn’t have it; it had never even been made. Instead, I was told I could make my own guide on a post it note (the only paper source available in the mouse rooms) and that I could ask my room lead (an animal care technician) to check the guide for me. Begrudgingly, I did so. I wish they had told me that I should have made my own guide to begin with instead of to have me waiting around for the one I assumed I was getting. I made my own guide, and had the technician look at it (she said it looked good). So, I followed that guide for a few hours only to realize that I had made a mistake in my guide. A mistake that my room lead gave the green light on. How can JAX expect its lower workers to be critical of the work they are performing if the room leads and upper staff are making similar mistakes and errors. Several months in, I watch other people get hired for the position. I’d estimate they hired around 10-12 new animal care trainees that I observed in the 6 months I was there. By the end of those six months, 5 of those people had quit, they had lasted less time than I had. I can’t blame them. I talked with them about their experiences with management and their mouse rooms. Most of their complaints aligned with mine, and we all agreed that management was abusing their powers and not setting people up to succeed. I want to mention the pressure they put on the animal care trainees to work extra and come in on the weekends. Most of the new trainees are relatively young people, me included, usually the 18-24 age range. These are people fresh out of high school, or maybe they’re in college or just graduated college. Most of these people are just looking for a paycheck or a career boost. JAX will force you to work on the weekends, they call everyone into a meeting and make them sign up for shifts for weekends. For me, it worked out to a Saturday shift about once every two weeks. These mice must get taken care of, every day, including weekends. So, once people start quitting, the other staff must bear the extra workload. Some people I knew were coming in 7 days a week to make this happen. The staffing issue was likely the biggest vice holding this position back from being bearable. It is nearly impossible to keep up with the mountain of work expected from each person. My mouse room after training consisted of just me and the room lead most of the time, and it was a pretty big room. Each box in the room had to be checked or changed every week no matter what. I was constantly faced with being told to “slow down so you don’t make mistakes” as well as “Management is expecting us to go faster to get this section of the room done today or else were coming in on Saturday”. So, which is it? Fast or slow? Both cannot work. The main issue is that that they don’t have enough animal care trainees, and this will continue to be one of the main issues until they can treat their trainees better (competitive pay, more personal respect, proper training, management that listens to the suggestions given). Until they are willing to do that, there will continue to be a revolving door of trainees that only stick around for a few months and don’t get trained enough to be effective at the job. Having less trainees also puts more stress on the existing trainees as they are expected and forced to pick up the slack left by the empty positions. (The mouse room I was in had a third trainee for a small time, however she quit, and I was expected to pick up 100% of her responsibilities with no pay increase or compensation). Every single other aspect of the lab is impacted by the work done by its animal care trainees. Without them, these important animals would die. So, why are they treated like mud on a boot? The promotion requirements were insane too. 200 boxes in a single 8-hour day, 3 days in a row, which worked out to around 25 boxes an hour or almost 2 minutes per box. (That doesn’t allocate any time for dealing with mice that could be experiencing a medical issue, counting newborn mice for record keeping, or bathroom breaks). If you can’t stand there like a mindless zombie doing the same few movements over and over at maximum speed for 8 hours and for 3 days in a row with no breaks than forget a promotion. This sort of expectation does not work in a setting like Jackson Labs where all work should be scientifically accurate, making sure each step is done properly and well to ensure consistency and few errors. Even if you do get that promotion, the career trajectory for this position is not great. Personally, I have a college degree, so this didn’t apply to me as much. HOWEVER, if you DON’T hold a college degree, you are very limited to what you can do as an animal care trainee in terms of advancement. You can only really become an animal care technician and keep climbing the animal care ladder. There is no room for horizontal movement, you will never be a research assistant or work elsewhere in the lab. This is not a career path most people want to be stuck in. The work is very dull and monotonous and gets boring very quickly. You cannot wear headphones or earbuds at all in these rooms (unless you are a research assistant which makes no sense why they are allowed but animal care trainees cannot) so good luck staying awake and alert. My last point I want to make is on the workplace culture, which is extremely toxic. Upon getting in trouble for the first time and needing to meet with my supervisor I was told that Jackson Labs was “like a small neighborhood” and that everyone heard about everything. Some of the people at the lab are nice, there are a handful of good ones. However, everyone else reminds me of a gossip loving highschooler. These people love drama and talking behind other people’s backs. Management absolutely plays favorites and will gaslight you into thinking you have made mistakes if they don’t like you. They do not care about you. In conclusion, if you are considering this position (especially if you are young) it is not worth your time. There is a reason that JAX feels forced to add sign on bonuses to all their open animal care trainee positions to try and increase hires. It may seem nice, but it is not worth the mental and physical anguish that make up this job. If you are willing to stick with it for a little bit, it could be a decent resume booster, but that’s it. There are so many better, more fulfilling, less artificially difficult positions out there for people with much better pay too. I gave 110% at JAX and still was treated like trash. I’m happy to say I’ve since gotten a new job with better pay, less stress, and coworkers who are far less toxic than 99% of who you find at JAX. In hindsight I am relieved that I was forced into a position where I had to quit, I would have hated becoming more involved in animal care with JAX, it would have been pure misery. Don’t waste your life here, your years are precious and you should have more self worth than working for JAX as an animal care trainee. At least the café is pretty nice.