Chief gemologist

Pay in the destination countries

Monthly, in US dollars. Each country is an Imora admission package — open one for that route's fees, language requirement and deadline.

What does the day look like?

You examine loose and mounted diamonds, coloured stones, pearls and finished jewellery under standard gemmological procedures: you grade colour, clarity, cut and carat weight, detect heat treatment, diffusion, fracture filling, HPHT and CVD laboratory-grown origin and assemblages, determine country of origin for premium ruby, sapphire, emerald and spinel where the lab offers it, and write the report wording that becomes a legal identification document. You work with a loupe, gem microscope, refractometer, polariscope, spectroscope, dichroscope, hydrostatic balance for specific gravity, UV lamp, FTIR spectrometer, UV-Vis spectrometer, Raman microspectrometer, ED-XRF spectrometer, LA-ICP-MS including the GemTOF platform at SSEF, and micro X-ray computerised tomography for pearls.

As chief you sign off reports, run quality control on small and large diamond grading, allocate stones across testers, defend origin calls in front of clients and auction specialists, teach courses, and manage administration, production of reports with Prooftag validation, and client contact. Looking at exceptional stones is 30 to 40 percent of a senior lab day; report writing, instrument calibration, database entry, client correspondence, teaching and management is the other 60 to 70 percent. Hours are standard laboratory daytime, 40 hours per week, with overtime around major auction seasons and express-service deadlines, no routine night shift and no hospital-type on-call rota, with travel to conferences, mining areas, trade fairs and the International Gemmological Conference.

Where does this lead?