Surveying BioPharma Job Ads

This is an interesting article in Nature Biotechnology that I'm trying to figure out whether I believe. It's a combination of interviews with managers across biopharma along with an analysis of open-position job ads from thousands of sources. What the authors are trying to do is figure out what sorts of skills employers in this field are looking for, and whether that's changed. First, let's go to what they found, then we can start the arguing. The quantitative data from all those job postings is presumably pretty solid. The degree-required distribution shows that (weirdly) 14% of the posted openings require only high-school level education, which makes me wonder if those positions, whatever they are, really qualify as "jobs in the biopharma industry" as opposed to "jobs in the hauling stuff around" industry. Past that, half of the total openings are bachelor's-level. 12% ask for a graduate or professional degree (I think that they have master's and PhD in there together), and most of the rest were unspecified. As for the skills listed as wanted, far and away the most mentioned was. . .chemistry. "Clinical research" runs a distant second. When they analyzed the names of the positions themselves, "Medical/clinical laboratory technician" was number one, with "Chemist" close behind. These are broad terms, which surely accounts for their dominance, but the number of positions using the word "Biologist" is still only about a third of those that say "Chemist". Now the paper switc...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs