Exploring Biotech Careers Online
We recently presented a webinar on exploring biotech careers and how to use Biotech-Careers.org for investigating how companies are fighting COVID-19. This purpose of this blog is to gather some of those topics in a single place together with the career exploration handouts from Dr. Karen Leung, City College of San Francisco.
2. Learn about Karen Leung's Career Exploration Course at City College of San Francisco
3. Go to the bottom of this page to download Dr. Leung's interest survey and assignments.
4. Chat session suggestions for having students research careers or prepare for internships
- Mock interviews with industry reps or alumni who are working in industry, this also gives the industry volunteers an easy chance to recruit
- Have faculty interview students before they do internships to hear how they describe what they know - and hopefully, prevent them from overstating what they know and to help them learn how to use their resumé when they answer questions
- Industry panel - Bring industry representatives to campus for a panel interview
- Dinner party career exploration - students read the alumni profiles and careers, then ask each other about their "jobs" at a pretend dinner party. This also can help students learn how to make small talk
- Informational interviews - the Bioscience Career Exploration course at City College of San Francisco has their students conduct information interviews with alumni and other people in the biotech industry. Learn more and download preparation documents and example questions from the Work-Based Learning in Biotech Collaborative.
5. A quick guide to using Biotech-Careers.org
Biotech-Careers.org has several features that students can use to learn about different kinds of careers in biotechnology.
Some of the features we’ll discuss here are:
- Careers
- Job Areas
- Alumni and Student Profiles
- The Biotech Company Database
- Using terms to learn what companies do
Careers
In the Careers section, we present several different careers from biotech job postings and describe what those jobs are like. If you click the Careers link at the top of the Biotech-Careers.org home page, you'll get to a page with all the careers.
This page lists jobs by the titles that companies often use. Each card shows the minimum education level needed for that job.
Clicking a career card, such as Cell Culture Technician, takes you to a more detailed description. If you’ve ever wondered what a Cell Culture Technician does, you can go to that page and learn about their role in a biotech company. For each biotech career, you’ll see a description of the job, the starting wage, related areas and jobs, the kinds of industry they work in, the minimum education required.
At the bottom of each career page, you'll find links to community college programs that offer training in this area.
If you clicked one of the links to a college education program, such as Stem Cell Technology, you would end up at the Stem Cell Technology page at InnovATEBIO.org. Scrolling down the page brings you to links to college programs offering offer training in this area.
Job areas
The Job Areas section presents information about several different sectors of the bioscience industry. Biotechnology is used in a wide group of industries, from farming to fashion and clean energy to cosmetics.
Explore the job areas. You’ll find that some jobs, like quality control, are needed in many different areas. Other jobs, like cell culture, are similar but not exactly the same. For example, a cell culture technician in drug discovery might be growing human or mouse cells, where a cell culture technician how works in horticulture is more likely to be growing plants. Links at the bottom of the page take you to alumni profiles, articles, related jobs, and videos.
Alumni and Student Profiles
These profiles are from students who are working or doing internships in the biotech industry. They help answer the question: What is like to work in a biotech career?
Use the profiles link to see profiles from many different alumni. We interviewed graduates and students from biotech programs around the US to learn more about what they do and find out how they would advise other students.
Click an alumni profile to learn about their job, see where they attended college, and read their advice.
Biotech Company Database
Select the Biotech Companies link to visit the company database.
The Biotech Company database contains almost 8000 companies that are tagged by what they what they work on (business or job area). We use almost 500 different tags to describe the companies and they can be quite helpful for learning about the industry. If you click a state in the state map, you can see learn about the kinds of biotech companies in that state.
Not only do states differ by numbers of companies, some states focus on very different business areas.
Terms
Searching for companies using terms
We learn more about companies by searching with terms or business areas. I decided to search for COVID-19.
COVID-19 is a term, so I click the Terms tab.
The link to the page I want is at the bottom.
At last, I can see all the companies in the database that work on COVID-19 organized by their other business interests.
