How Spectroscopy Education Has Fallen Off

Once considered the anchors of quality spectroscopy education, conference training and in-person short courses have dropped precipitously. This ongoing trend can be attributed to numerous factors, including the automation of instruments, education becoming more unaffordable, and companies cutting application science support.

Younger scientists have also grown up in a different era, one that is filled with online learning tools and smartphones. As a result, younger scientists are consuming knowledge differently than previous generations. Targeted online videos have become the go-to resource for this demographic, but the problem is that the content they have access to varies wildly in its quality. SpecAcademy is designed to meet learners online while providing expert curation and technical depth.

The third part of a recent panel discussion explores this topic at length. Below is a transcript of that conversation. To watch the video, you can find it at this link or in the literature below.^1,2

Ellen Miseo: We've talked a lot about why SpecAcademy is necessary and what we see. I think one of the things that I'd like to move on to is prior to Spec Academy, how did people get educated? And where has stuff fallen? Where has education fallen off, and why did we do this?

Jim de Haseth: I'll start. I started teaching short courses in 1982, so I've seen a few years of education. And most of those courses were done with Peter Griffiths in infrared (IR) spectroscopy because at the time, Raman, although it existed, was not as easily accessible, so it was a vibrational spectroscopy course. It was still sufficiently new enough, and a lot of people realized they needed to use it. We used to have good-sized courses with 40–50 people at conferences, and we taught courses at venues away from conferences, ones that were run by other groups. This was standard operating procedure.

What we began to notice was that the instruments became much more automated. From a financial viewpoint, it was better for the instrument companies to employ fewer application scientists and automate analyses. As such, people became convinced that they didn't need the training, and that the instruments were automatic. I suppose we could call this some sort of truly artificial intelligence (AI). As such, the amount of expertise started to drop, and we're seeing fewer and fewer people at the courses for various reasons. One is the expense their companies go to, the time that they have to spend doing it not at work, but also the idea that why do this because the instruments can do it for me. I think we have to break that hold and get the message across that humans are much better than automated instruments.

Peter Larkin: I've also seen a difference in the business model over time. What I mean by that is that in industry, you had the luxury of focusing on just one technique. There are less people covering more techniques. The consequence of that is that you have less experts and more generalists. The consequence of that is a generalist is less likely, because they're being spread too thin, to be able to have the opportunity to really be able to acquire the knowledge, experience, and expertise needed. We need to reach out to where those people are with modern technology. I think that's where SpecAcademy comes in, so that we can fill those gaps in an easy way and meet the changing world where it is.

Ellen Miseo: One of the things that I was going to say is having worked for an instrument manufacturer, one of the things that I saw related to applications chemists is that the industrial customers were pushing to the infrared and Raman companies to make the analysis of those instruments be like how gas chromatography (GC) or liquid chromatography (LC) analyses are because you can go right now to Waters and look up how to do an LC analysis of compound X. It's a lot of cookbook chemistry, and you can't do that with infrared and Raman. And I think that senior management doesn't necessarily understand that, so they want more generalists who can do the cookbook stuff when that isn't what's necessary; again, another reason for SpecAcademy.

Peter Larkin: I would add to that, in my world, vibrational spectroscopy is a really nice field to be in because it's a very big playground. It doesn't lend itself too much to the cookbook, and so, in particular, because of that central fact, it's complex and interesting. Therefore, it requires lifelong learning, and it needs people that are curious and like to do puzzles and like to do new things.

Jeff D’Agostino: I see that there's a change in the way people are learning. The younger people tend to be away from in-person, and they would rather be on their phone or online listening to a course or listening to somebody talking about a very specific thing that they're looking at. They will look up how to do X, Y, and Z, and they'll Google it, and they'll come up with two, three, four, or 10 different videos, and they'll look at those videos and then move on. And that is where we have plenty of videos here [on SpecAcademy] that is going to help teach these people.

Ellen Miseo: Part of the problem, though, with that is there's lots of videos out there that are downright wrong. That's one of the advantages of SpecAcademy: it's curated. Yes, you can go on YouTube and find out how to, as an example, do an attenuated total reflectance (ATR) measurement, but is it going to go into all the ins and outs of ATR elements, angles of incidence, sample, etc.? No. But that will be something that is presented in SpecAcademy.

Jim de Haseth: I think it also has to be realized that the chemical industry is changing. I don't mean management and so on, but in the materials that are being looked at and in how the problems are getting far more complex. They're new venues, and I hear this from the participants we have in some of our other courses. They are doing things that nobody's done before. You can't go to YouTube and figure out how to do it. You have to apply the fundamentals, and from those fundamentals know how to proceed, and I think that's what a lot of the courses are teaching. You have to have a strong basis to go forward.

Mary Carrabba: In the R&D environment, you're usually doing something that's never been done before, and you need to have a broad knowledge of a lot of different types of techniques, not just nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and mass spectrometry, but vibrational spectroscopy is one powerful tool in the analytical chemist's toolbox, and they need to be aware of all of the applications that are out there.

Jim de Haseth: That's true. You'd never go to a mechanic with one size wrench.

Mary Carrabba: Exactly.

Ellen Miseo: It's not only vibrational spectroscopy because I was having a conversation with somebody, and they had a fairly simple mixture, and they were talking about going off and doing GC, LC, and I said these are all colored. What about TLC, thin-layer chromatography? And it was like, “oh. Do people still do that?”

Jeff D’Agostino: (laughing) Yes, they do.

References

1. Miseo, E. V.; Carrabba, M.; Larkin, P. J.; D’Agostino, J.; de Haseth, J.; Wetzel, W. What is SpecAcademy and What Need Does It Fill? Spectroscopy Online, 2026. https://www.spectroscopyonline.com/view/what-is-specacademy-and-what-need-does-it-fill- (accessed September 28, 2026).
2. Miseo, E. V.; Carrabba, M.; Larkin, P. J.; D’Agostino, J.; de Haseth, J.; Wetzel, W. The Ongoing Decline of Spectroscopy Expertise. Spectroscopy Online, 2026. https://www.spectroscopyonline.com/view/the-ongoing-decline-of-spectroscopy-expertise (accessed September 30, 2026).