In biopharma research and development, laboratory data now exist in petabytes. Today’s fastest liquid-handling robots can dispense samples into 384 wells in a matter of seconds. Vaccines, which have traditionally been grown in eggs or cell cultures can now be printed. Algorithms are the path to discovering new materials. The pace of the industry’s technical innovation in the past five years alone has been head-spinning.
As the tools and techniques change, so do the demands on teams. Now common on biotech job boards are positions like cloud engineer, data scientist, automation engineer, software engineer, machine learning engineer, and computational biologist.
And as is the case in almost every industry, biotech is feeling the hiring pinch. Biotech innovations have already created an 80% skills mismatch for biopharma manufacturing companies, whereby the current workforce is not always equipped to usher in new product modalities or manage the digitization and automation requirements of modern science. Meanwhile, demand for data analysts, data scientists, and data engineers is expected to be four times higher than supply.
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