[JamesianP]

In my experience it's almost always the case with industry that you end up in some adjacent niche that isn't quite exactly what you want to do, even if you never leave the field of your schooling. By that I mean it may be a lot easier to get into computational chemistry for something other than drug design.

It's a weird time now with software eating everything and many science jobs asking for PhD in <our science branch> or Computer Science (!) as requirements. So I'd assume there's some angle in which your experience provides an advantage.

[toddm]

@JamesianP - You're exactly right about the heady requirement lift. And there are plenty of widely-defined computational chemistry jobs, especially when you throw in the bio- prefix.

As for the adjacent niche bit, right again as you are about experience. My time as a so-called "data scientist" was never really the best fit, and I could never compete with the folks who do Kaggle competitions and have a real passion for AI/ML (which, to me, is one of the defining points of "data science" today).

However, I've logged a lot of time over the past 30+ years in front of the terminal, so fingers crossed!