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CAREERS AND RECRUITMENT
An interdisciplinary shift in demand for talent within the biotech industry
npg 2013 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.
Kathy L Nugent & Avi Kulkarni
A shift away from hiring narrowly focused specialists to individuals with interdisciplinary academic training highlights the latest life sciences workforce trends.
National employment in the US life sciences industry totaled 1.61 million in
2010, with these jobs spanning over 70,000 individual companies1. In fact, over the past decade the life sciences industry has consistently outpaced the overall national private sector, adding new jobs at nearly twice the rate. This is not to say that this sector has been immune to the global recession. Indeed, the industry has faced a host of challenges with funding at the top of the listthat have forced a change in business models, partnerships and strategic alliances, the capabilities deployed in R&D, and the relationship with customers, particularly large payers such as health insurers. As the industry strives to meet these challenges while continuing to grow, it demands a talent pool with a strong knowledge base, with all of the components necessary to translate scientific discovery effectively and efficiently into commercial products. Two of the most pressing questions for our industry today are, Where are the jobs? and Where are the jobs going to be?
A strong and evolving need for talentTo address these questions and to begin to develop a national snapshot of the current and projected talent needs in the life sciences industry, the Coalition of State Bioscience Institutes (CSBI), in collaboration with Booz & Company, conducted a series of
interviews with 26 strategic industry leadersincluding CEOs, heads of R&D, commercial development, human resources and manufacturingfrom March to May 2013. These interviews were conducted in parallel with quantitative analysis using Burning Glass, a proprietary platform that aggregates, extracts, codes and normalizes job data from more than 23,000 job boards, newspapers, employers and other websites.
The introductory analysis generated from these interviews begins to articulate the demand for the most critical talent, training, and skill needs of the life sciences industry today and is intended to enlist additional broad-scale industry participation in an annual in-depth report. Furthermore, information generated from this analysis and future reports will help to inform the actions that...