January 25, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
New reports are suggesting that more and more life science and healthcare companies in the biopharma arena are hiring MBAs.
Although healthcare in general tends to hire fewer B-school grads than other areas, Cynthia Saunders-Cheatham, executive director of careers at Cornell’s Johnson School, indicates that recruitment in the health care sector doubled last year. The biggest movers and shakers in the area are Johnson & Johnson , Bayer , and Genentech .
“We see large firms and start-ups with hiring needs in supply chain, marketing, and finance,” Dean Vera, director of career management at Rutgers Business School, told BusinessBecause.
And the bigger pharmaceutical companies round it out, including Pfizer , GlaxoSmithKline , Bristol-Myers Squibb , and Novartis AG .
The recent mega-merger between Pfizer and Allergan is expected to make sometimes contradictory changes in hiring. The two companies have major worldwide manufacturing capabilities. Pfizer currently operates a network of 55 internal product facilities. Allergan, Inc. runs more than 40, so the merged companies total 95, although that number doesn’t take into consideration Pfizer’s acquisition of Hospira, Inc. last September. That brought in another 16, minus the Clayton, N.C. plant that was closed in June. So the merged companies will have a manufacturing network of 110 sites, at minimum.
Some jobs will be cut, however, since Allergan sold its generic drug business to Israel-based Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. in late July for $45.5 billion. That’s expected to result in some staff and facilities cuts.
It’s also not clear on how such a merger will affect contract research organizations (CROs). CROs handle a large number of tasks for drug companies, including regulatory consulting, running clinical trials, and helping to develop reimbursement strategies. Pfizer has utilized several CROs over the years, including Parexel International Corp. , Icon Plc, and Pharmaceutical Product Development LLC (PPD).
According to data supplied by Bloomberg, J&J has been particularly aggressive in hiring business-school graduates. In 2014, J&J’s recruitment of MBAs and undergraduates at business schools like Kenan-Flagler and IE increased 20 percent, hiring four times more than the second spot, Eli Lilly.
“A blue chip MBA helps to connect the bedside to the business side,” Matthew Hanley, chief medical officer for the metro group at Carolinas HealthCare told BusinessBecause.
An analysis of the business-side hiring in biopharma appears to be at least somewhat related to the rise of so-called digital health. That includes areas such as social media and wearable technology. It’s not really clear why those areas would increase business graduate hiring, as opposed to say, writing, , journalism, and IT-related fields.
Federico Lega, director of the masters in international healthcare management program at SDA Bocconi School of Management, told BusinessBecause that the growth in digital health requires people with a fundamental understanding of health care who can lead multidisciplinary teams. “We call these people e-health managers.”
Perhaps so, but business grads should be aware that the last two years—at least—have shown an explosion of merger-and-acquisition activity in the biopharma and health care industry. This certainly provides opportunities, but it also can make for a very volatile work environment.
In a 2014 McKinsey & Company publication on the rapid growth in biopharma, the authors of the book “From Science to Operations: Questions, Choices and Strategies for Success in Biopharma,” write, “The prize for organizations that master these operational challenges is far more significant than just short-term competitive advantage. Many of the next major opportunities for biotech will require companies to develop new and different technologies and operating models. Today’s actions will shape companies’ readiness to grasp these opportunities as they come to fruition.”
