BioPharm Executive: Where the Jobs Aren't

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Where the Jobs Aren't

Economists and politicians are fond of talking about retooling and retraining for new industries and opportunities. The automotive worker who has just been laid off shouldn't expect his job to come back--he should face reality and retrain for something different.

In a harsh economic environment, this is probably good advice, but it has perhaps been easier to hand out in the past because it has typically been aimed at blue collar workers. Yet one of the earmarks of the recent recession is that, while manufacturing once again took heavy job losses, many redundancies came from white collar jobs. And the pharmaceutical industry, of course, has seen particularly dramatic cuts.

Pfizer's recent announcement of another 6,000 job cuts is part of its previous plan to cut 19,000 positions, but that's just a drop in the bucket. If I'm doing my sums correctly, over 130,000 pharmaceutical industry jobs have been lost since the beginning of 2008 with very little hiring (data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas). Most of these jobs were in the U.S.

And here's the thing: It's hard to tell a research chemist who spent eight or 10 years getting an undergraduate and graduate education that he or she should retool for a new industry. Spend another decade to get a similar level of expertise in a new area? Not exactly practical. Apply his or her existing skills to something else? Perhaps, but the problem with the level of specialization required in many scientific jobs is that it leaves many individuals formally unqualified for much outside their chosen field. Move downward into less-skilled positions? Some ultimately do this, but it is an enormous waste of talent.

Yet it's hard to avoid the conclusion that many of the jobs cut over the last few years aren't coming back--or certainly not anytime soon. And what's interesting is that we've been fed for years on the truism that the U.S. trails in the education and training of mathematicians and scientists. Government programs have been aimed at steering young people toward the sciences and better preparing children to move in that direction. And now we seem to have more scientists than we need.

But is that really true? I don't think so. The world is driven by technological innovation, and that doesn't appear to be changing anytime soon. Who will feed it? Oft-touted statistics about huge numbers of scientists and engineers coming out of Asia are wildly misleading, because they include graduates with two-year associate degrees. A June 2009 article in Foreign Policy concludes that "once quality is factored in, Asia's lead disappears altogether." Of course "scientists and engineers" is a pretty broad category, but the U.S. still has the most dynamic entrepreneurialism in the world and the best chance of finding employment for skilled minds over the long term.

That doesn't mean there aren't wrenching times ahead, though, or that the narrowly focused skills of today's doctoral graduates are ideally situated for the future. There is one piece of unsolicited advice that I feel comfortable giving only because it is inspired by the great E.O. Wilson: Young scientists now in school should strive to be a little more well-rounded. If nothing else, it can aid the cause of science: Too many PhDs know next to nothing about other specialties and find it hard to think outside the confines of their training. But it has advantages outside the lab, too. Scientists who take the time to add a few courses in business and economics, or develop their writing skills, may well find it gives them more options when it comes to taking a parallel leap into a new profession. - Karl Thiel

Read the BioPharm Executive online newsletter May 2010.

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