Biotech programs: using job trends for program planning

Effective program planning and workforce training require that biotechnology programs keep tabs on the hiring needs of their local employers. Sometimes getting these data and updating them in real time can be a challenge. Most biotech programs have industry advisory boards, but their boards might be narrowly based or unaware of other companys' hiring needs. State workforce departments might be able to provide information, but the variety of job descriptions can make data gathering difficult.

I was pleased to see that SimplyHired.com, the job search site I wrote about earlier, has some tools that address this problem.

After doing a search, the bottom left corner of the SimplyHired search page contains an area called "Job Search Tools." Two interesting tools in the collection are links to Salaries and to Trends. The Trends link shows data about hiring from the past two years.

What terms are used to describe jobs?

An important characteristic of job data is that our results vary quite a bit depending on our search terms. SimplyHired uses an algorithm that searches for the presence of a term in a job description. All job descriptions that contain a term are counted and displayed. Although we can get more results for more generic terms, our resulting numbers are too high and contain too little detail. For example, searching with the word "Biology" gives us adds for biology instructors, scientists, tutors, internships, and industry positions, among others.

On the other hand, job descriptions that are too specific, or use terms that are more regional, can miss applicable positions. In the graph below, we see that the numbers for "Biological Science Technician" dwarf the the numbers of available positions for biomanufacturing, biotechnicians, and biology technicians. If we look more closely at the job descriptions, we find many of the jobs in the "Biological Science Technician" category overlap the descriptions we would apply to biotechnicians. Other data at SimplyHired.com show that 66% of these jobs today, require a bachelor's degree or less.

Types of jobs

Even though we miss finding some positions, more specific search terms do help us in planning and tell us something about regional demand for different types of skills. In the graph below, I searched with "biology technician", "biology lab techician", biotechnician, "cell culture technician", "genomics technician", and biomanufacturing to see the relative hiring, on a nationwide scale in these different areas.

Data provided by SimplyHired.com a search engine for jobs.

Hiring has been greatest in Biomanufacturing, although it seems to have dropped quite a bit since June 2009.

If we take Biomanufacturing out of the search, we can see that hiring varies by specialty. Cell culture specialists are hired in cyclical patterns. Hiring for biology technicians and biotechnicians seem to have opposite trends. If biotechnician hiring is high, then biology technician hiring is low and vice versa. This seems odd given that the two job descriptions should overlap in terms of skills.

Bringing the data back home

Now we that have some idea about the terms that are used and the relative hiring rates. How do we apply these data to local areas?

At this point, we can start to add locations to our search.