BIOTECH DIVES DEEP FOR TALENT
Execs, academics huddling
Biotech execs — sounding the alarm over a limited pool of talent in the Bay State — will meet tomorrow with academic leaders to tackle the shortage of trained workers that threatens to slow growth in the booming life sciences industry.
A jobs report yesterday on the Massachusetts biotechnology sector raised concerns that positions are going unfilled as companies wait for the right stuff, noting that two-thirds of companies surveyed said it is taking more than 10 weeks to fill many openings — about three times the national average.
Three in 10 employers said the time-to-hire stretched to 13plus weeks, with openings in research and development, clinical research and regulatory compliance topping the most-difficultto-fill list.
“It’s clear we need to grow the available pool of talent from which the industry can draw employees,” said Peter Abair, executive director of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Educational Foundation, which authored the report.
Tomorrow, more than 200 leaders from industry and academia will meet at the Life Sciences Workforce Conference at Northeastern University to ensure that colleges and universities understand what kind of training and specialities are needed as the industry expands.
“What we’ve seen over the last four years is the industry has grown by 20 percent, about twice the rate of the economy,” said Mark Bruso, manager of labor market research for MassBioEd.
In 2017, Massachusetts employment in the life sciences exceeded 70,000, more than at any other point in state history, Bruso said. There were also 28,000 biopharma job openings, he said, because companies are expanding, creating more job opportunities and, with them, more turnover than in many other industries.
And while that alone is not cause for alarm, Bruso said, it could take on growing urgency by 2023, when the number of biopharma jobs in the state is expected to reach 81,000.
Massachusetts Biotechnology Council founder David Lucchino said the state’s high-tech sectors need to recruit talent from up and down the educational ladder.
“One of the areas we are focused on are the men and women ... in junior colleges, two years schools,” said Lucchino, who also runs Frequency Therapeutics in Woburn, “How do we give those folks the right training? Because you don’t want an economy where you have to go to MIT or Boston University or Harvard in order to play for it. It takes a team to really do this, and it can’t be perceived as a team of people only going to these top universities.”
‘It’s clear we need to grow the available pool of talent from which the industry can draw employees.’ — PETER ABAIR, Massachusetts Biotechnology Educational Foundation