02 Oct Do you have an issue with retention?

The rapidly growing biotech sector poses a challenge for retention, as comparable roles may pay more and provide additional opportunities for career development. This underscores the importance of having well-thought-out career ladders.

In addition, we know that the academic setting provides many enrichment opportunities a commercial setting cannot, and it is incumbent upon mangers to highlight and offer those opportunities. Engagement examples might include publication authorship, participation in facility tours or patient/media visits or delivery of product to a patient’s bedside. The working group has found that any activity which helps connect team members more personally to the outcomes of the manufactured products is powerful.

For further thoughts on retention, please read this white paper with retention suggestions:

02 Oct Do you have a career ladder and, if so, what does progression look like?

All members of the working group are in the process of developing and expanding internal career ladders to aid in retention and growth within their teams. This effort is especially critical as many sites are located in regions where they must compete with biotech companies for talented workers.

In these ladders, many sites have developed pathways for individual-contributor advancement, separate from traditional promotion into management roles. While all team members want to grow in their careers, they should not be limited by the requirements of a managerial track including number of reports, number of the management roles or their lack of desire to grow by managing others.

From experience, we know that the unique nature of GMP work may not fit well into existing institutional HR job codes and so it is important to develop new job codes and roles, separate from the traditional Research Associate/Research Scientist pathway. This effort often requires hiring managers to work closely with HR so that they better understand the GMP’s needs as well as creatively adapting existing job titles. This allows benchmarking against industry-equivalent positions and responsibilities.

02 Oct What background and experience, both level and type, do you look for?

There are a variety of approaches to building biomanufacturing teams, and they are driven, in part, by the facility certification and the types of work being performed. Many of these roles can be trained for and each of our institutions are positioned to provide extensive training, allowing us to consider candidates with varying levels of education, from those with a high school diploma to those with a PhD. Hands-on experience in the lab or blood banking-environment is much more common. Some roles such as Quality Assurance lend themselves to candidates with prior industry experience. Some institutions make use of med techs with hospital experience, in addition to or in place of team members with research backgrounds and find that their experience with regulated work and the standard of care practices can help to accelerate their training.

“We prefer to hire entry level technicians. Due to the specialization, finding experienced technicians is difficult. We end up paying more for experience that is not relevant to our department”