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Entomologist

Department of Health and Human Services
Food and Drug Administration
Office of Regulatory Affairs (ORA) - Office of Regulatory Science (ORS)
This job announcement has closed

Summary

This position is located in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Office of Regulatory Affairs (ORA), Office of Regulatory Science (ORS). ORA protects consumers and enhances public health by maximizing compliance of FDA regulated products and minimizing risk associated with those products and to ensure that all food is safe, all medical products are save and effective, and the public health is advanced and protected.

Overview

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Hiring complete
Open & closing dates
10/31/2022 to 11/09/2022
Salary
$76,135 to - $98,970 per year
Pay scale & grade
GS 11
Location
Irvine, CA
1 vacancy
Remote job
No
Telework eligible
Yes—as determined by the agency policy.
Travel Required
25% or less - You may be expected to travel up to 25% for this position.
Relocation expenses reimbursed
No
Appointment type
Permanent
Work schedule
Full-time
Service
Competitive
Promotion potential
12
Job family (Series)
Supervisory status
No
Security clearance
Not Required
Drug test
No
Position sensitivity and risk
Moderate Risk (MR)
Trust determination process
Announcement number
FDA-ORA-23-DE-11705117-EC
Control number
686135800

This job is open to

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The public

U.S. Citizens, Nationals or those who owe allegiance to the U.S.

Career transition (CTAP, ICTAP, RPL)

Federal employees whose job, agency or department was eliminated and are eligible for priority over other applicants.

Clarification from the agency

This position is open to US Citizens, CTAP, ICTAP and RPL eligibles.

Duties

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  • Inspect regulated products and manufacturers, conducting sample analyses of regulated products, and reviewing imported products offered for entry into the United States.
  • Perform the full range of entomology on a variety of samples, including the difficult, complex or unusual samples submitted by agency personnel.
  • Write reports that identify the sample, show the methods and procedures used, any modifications with validation data, the results and their interpretation, and whether the sample appears to be in violation of any agency regulation.

Requirements

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Conditions of employment

  • Citizenship Requirement: You must be a U.S. Citizen to be considered for this advertisement unless explicitly stated otherwise.
  • Selective Service Registration: All applicants born male, on (or after) 12/31/1959, must be registered with the Selective Service System OR have an approved exemption. Visit www.SSS.gov for more info.
  • FDA participates in e-Verify: All new hires must complete the I-9 form; this information will be processed through e-Verify to determine your employment eligibility. If a discrepancy arises, you must take affirmative steps to resolve the matter.
  • Background Investigation Requirement: All employees must pass a security investigation. Failing to pass the background check may be grounds for removal or legal action. If hired, you may be subject to additional investigations at a later time.
  • You must meet ALL requirements by the closing date of this announcement to be considered. Only education, experience, and qualifications attained by this date will be considered. You must continue to meet all requirements through the hiring process.
  • Certification of Accuracy: All information concerning eligibility and qualification is subject to investigation and verification. False representation may be grounds for non-consideration, non-selection, or appropriate legal action.
  • Direct Deposit: You will be required to have all federal salary payments electronically deposited into a bank account with a financial institution of your choice.
  • Additional selections may be made from this vacancy, within the same geographical area, by other organizational elements from within FDA, through shared corporate recruiting activities.

Qualifications

The position of Entomologist falls under the 0414 occupational series. To qualify for this position at grade GS-11, you must meet all requirements by 11:59 pm EST on 11/09/2022.

Basic Requirements:

Degree: entomology; or a related discipline of the biological or physical sciences that included at least 16 semester hours in entomology.

-OR-

Combination of education and experience: courses equivalent to a major that included course work described in the statement above, plus appropriate experience or additional education.


Minimum Qualifications:

Specialized experience is experience that equipped the applicant with the particular knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform successfully the duties of the position, and that is typically in or related to the work of the position to be filled. The specialized experience must demonstrate one year of full-time work experience, or the equivalent if part-time (for example, an employee working 20 hours per week for a 12-month period should be credited with 6 months of experience.) Experience may have been obtained in either the federal service or its equivalent with state or local government, the private sector, or nongovernmental organizations.

GS-11: You must have 1 year of specialized experience equivalent to at least the GS-09, in the Federal service, which includes: collecting samples for use in determining whether entomological concerns exist, making conclusions through performing scientific analysis, and describing findings related to entomology through written reports or summaries.

-OR-

Education: Ph.D. or equivalent doctoral degree or 3 full years of progressively higher level graduate education leading to such a degree in a field which demonstrates the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to do the work of the position.

-OR-

A combination of specialized experience and education as described above that, when combined, equal 100% of the total requirement.

NOTE: It is your responsibility to ensure your responses and appropriate documentation is submitted prior to the closing date. To verify your application is complete, log into your USAJOBS account, https://my.usajobs.gov/Account/Login, select the Application Status link and then select the More Information link for this position. The Details page will display the status of your application, the documentation received and processed, and any correspondence the agency has sent related to this application. Be sure that any uploaded documents you provide in your application are free of document security or compression which might render the document unreadable by our system.

IN DESCRIBING YOUR EXPERIENCE, PLEASE BE CLEAR AND SPECIFIC. WE WILL NOT MAKE ASSUMPTIONS REGARDING YOUR EXPERIENCE. Qualifications are based on breadth/level of experience. In addition to describing duties performed, applicants must provide the exact dates of each period of employment (from MM/YY to MM/YY) and the number of hours worked per week if part time. As qualification determinations cannot be made when resumes do not include the required information, failure to provide this information may result in disqualification. Applicants are encouraged to use the USAJOBS Resume Builder to develop their federal resume.

Experience refers to paid and unpaid experience, including volunteer work done through National Service programs (e.g., Peace Corps, AmeriCorps) and other organizations (e.g., professional; philanthropic; religious; spiritual; community, student, social). Volunteer work helps build critical competencies, knowledge, and skills and can provide valuable training and experience that translates directly to paid employment. You will receive credit for all qualifying experience, including volunteer experience.

Education

TRANSCRIPTS:
Positions which are scientific or technical in nature often have very specific educational requirements. You must submit an official transcript, unofficial transcript, or a list including courses, grades earned, completion dates, and quarter and semester hours earned. If you are using education completed in foreign colleges or universities, see the Foreign Education section below for additional requirements.

Pay careful attention to the Qualifications and Education sections to identify vacancies where a transcript is required. Even if you hold a similar position or are a current employee, you are not exempt from transcript requirements.

Electronic Transcript Caution: If you have obtained your transcripts electronically, the file might contain security measures that could prevent our application system from reading the file. Therefore, you should consider asking the institution to provide the file in a non-secured electronic format. Alternatively, you could scan or take a photo of the printed copy of the transcript. If your uploaded transcript cannot be read by our system, you may receive consideration and credit for the information we can access.

See the Application Manager Documentation for tips on submitting your paper-based documents.

FOREIGN EDUCATION
Applicants using part, or all of their education completed outside of the U.S. to meet the qualification requirements, must have their foreign education evaluated by an accredited organization to ensure that the foreign education is comparable to education received in accredited educational institutions in the U.S. We will only accept the completed foreign credential evaluation.

To be acceptable, the foreign credential evaluation must include/describe at a minimum, the following information: (1) The type of education received by the applicant; (2) The level of education in relation to the U.S. education system, and state that its comparability recommendations follow the general guidelines of the International Evaluation Standards Council; (3) The content of the applicant's educational program earned abroad, and the standard obtained; (4) The status of the awarding foreign school's recognition and legitimacy in its home country's education system; and (5) Any other information of interest such as what the evaluation service did to obtain this information, the qualifications of the evaluator, and any indications as to other problems such as forgery. Note: Some positions require the completion of specific courses or a specified number of credit hours. Therefore, the foreign credential evaluation should provide information similar to that of an official transcript, to include a list of the courses taken, quarter and/or semester hours awarded, the cumulative grade point average (GPA), honors received, if any, date degree awarded.
Applicants can request an evaluation from a member organization of one of the two national associations of credential evaluation services listed below:

  1. National Association of Credential Evaluation Services (NACES)
  2. Association of International Credentials Evaluators (AICE)
Credential evaluations are not free, and applicants are responsible for the cost of the selected service.
For more information about this requirement, please visit the U.S. Department of Education website for Foreign Education Evaluation

Additional information

For some advertisements, the Food & Drug Administration receives hundreds, even thousands, of applications from job-seekers. Because of this high level of interest in positions with the FDA, the agency reserves the option of setting an application number limit.

When an application limit is set, USAJOBS will close the vacancy at 11:59 pm Eastern Time on either:
(A) the day the limit is reached,
-OR-
(B) the pre-defined closing date of 11/09/2022, whichever comes first.

If the limit is reached before 11:59 pm ET, all applications in excess of the limit will continue to be accepted until 11:59 pm ET.

The application limit, if applicable, for this advertisement is: No Limit

For more information about announcement closing, see: https://www.usajobs.gov/Help/faq/job-announcement/expiration/

If you are serving, or have served in the last 5 years (from 11/09/2022) as an Executive Branch political, Schedule C, or Non-career SES appointee, HHS/FDA may be required to obtain approval by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) prior to beginning employment. You can find out if you have held one of these appointment types by looking at your Standard Form 50s in your Electronic Official Personnel Folder (eOPF), in Section 5 where the legal authorities are listed. If you have served or are currently serving, you must provide a copy of your SF-50, Notification of Personnel Action, documenting this appointment. In addition, you will be required to respond to the question in the assessment and certify your responses to the questionnaire. Political Appointee FAQ - OPM
  • Pre-Employment Physical: NO
  • Drug Testing Requirement: NO
  • License Requirement: NO
  • Immunization Requirement: NO
  • Mobility Agreement Required: NO
  • Bargaining Unit: YES- American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE)
All requirements must be met by the closing date of this announcement (11/09/2022); only education and experience gained by this date will be considered. You must continue to meet all requirements throughout the entire hiring process.

How you will be evaluated

You will be evaluated for this job based on how well you meet the qualifications above.

Please follow all instructions carefully. Errors or omissions may affect your eligibility.

About Category Rating (DEU) Procedures (Basis for Rating):

  • Category rating procedures will be used to rate and rank candidates.
  • The answers you provide to the applicant self-assessment questions will be used, in conjunction with the supporting documents you include, and your resume, to determine your eligibility for Federal employment and your qualification for this position specifically.
  • Your application score is used to place you into one of three quality categories: "Best Qualified", "Well Qualified", and "Qualified". (The category assignment is a measure of the degree in which your background matches the competencies required for this position.)
  • The cut-off score for each quality category may vary from announcement to announcement, and is determined by each agency, in advance of the advertisement going live.
  • Category Rating does not add veterans preference points but protects the rights of veterans by placing them ahead of non-preference eligibles within each category. Preference eligible Vets who meet the minimum qualification requirements and who have a compensable service-connected disability of at least 10% or higher must be listed in the highest quality category (except in the case of scientific or professional positions at the GS-9 level or higher).
  • Interagency / Career Transition Assistance Program (I/CTAP):Well-Qualified is defined as an applicant who meets the qualification standards and eligibility requirements for the position, including minimum educational and experience requirements; any qualifications and suitability; is able to perform the essential duties of the position, with or without reasonable accommodation; meets any applicable selective placement factors for the position (such as the ability to speak a specific language or any other factor required immediately upon hire); and is able to satisfactorily perform the duties of the position upon entry. To be well-qualified and exercise selection priority for this vacancy, surplus or displaced Federal employees must be rated at 85.0 or above on the rating criteria for this position. Learn more on the USAJOBS Career Transition Assistance Site.
Your qualifications will be evaluated on the following competencies (knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics). You do not need to respond to the KSA's directly, but your resume should contain sufficient information to demonstrate possession of the Competencies.
  1. Entomology
  2. Research
  3. Writing
To preview the application assessment questions, click the link below:
https://apply.usastaffing.gov/ViewQuestionnaire/11705117

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