THE ROLE:
Now that we understand what it is you’re looking for from back in STEP 2, let’s learn about what your options are for jobs in the biotech industry. In high school and college it’s difficult to actually appreciate and understand what the day to day activities will be like in potential jobs. That’s where I’m here to help you! I will outline some of the most common roles and provide an overview of the daily tasks and impact to the company.
Technician/Engineer – An expert on specific devices or processes, often responsible for operating, repairing, installing devices for clients.
Manufacturing Associate – Responsible for actually handling the company’s product and is typically performed in a clean room environment.
Research Associate – Performs exploratory research, often focused on identifying new targets that could eventually become products for the company.
Development Associate – Transitions research to clinical or manufacturing scale processes, often implementing new devices and technology into existing processes.
Statistician – Analyzes clinical data and provides input to how clinical trials should be designed.
Quality Control – Quality is the most important aspect of a product, so this role is responsible for maintaining the assays that are used on products and ensure that it meets acceptable standards.
Regulatory – Has a high level of understanding around the laws and regulations (FDA, EMA, etc.) and will be the first layer of communication with those agencies.
Manufacturing Operations (Manufacturing Science & Technology) – Responsible for transferring processes or changes to the manufacturing sites and troubleshooting and issues, deviations, or trends.
Patient Advocacy – A face of the company that communicates with patient organizations and ensures that their needs are being met by the company and the products
Medical Science Liason – Communicates with medical professionals to gain insights and desires on what would make a product more useful to them and teach them about how the product can benefit patients
THE LOCATION:
Next, you need to figure out where (location-wise) you want to work. This is also super important! Luckily there are some hubs that are very densely populated with awesome biotech companies, especially in the US. Don’t worry if your family or other commitments would make it hard to move to one of these places! There are more companies out there than you can imagine.
This resource funded by the National Science Foundation is really helpful to narrow down your search by location. You can search using the map or through a table and filter down to exactly what you want.
The best part is that if there is a specific “Business Area” that interests you (Drug Delivery, for example), you can click that link and find more companies that focus on that! This is such a useful tool. I wish I knew about when I was searching.
THE COMPANY:
Now you’ve probably narrowed down what roles and locations you’re interested in. It’s time to actually identify the companies you’d want to work for! The reasons to choose a company are different for everyone. Maybe you want to work on a specific disease like we discussed in STEP 2. Maybe there’s a technology that really excites you. Maybe you want to break into the industry and gain entry level experience so you can work someplace you’re passionate about later.
Whatever your reasons, the company matters.
Let’s pick out the companies that interested you from the biotech companies map. Do some digging! Take a look at their website, see if they’ve been in the news recently, search for any TED Talks that they’ve been featured in, and hear what employees had to say on Glassdoor.
If you’re anything like me (awkwardly in love with excel)… Now would be a great time to start a spreadsheet to help you organize the companies you’re interested in, record why, and eventually track your application status. Some time later on I’ll be sure to send out some details around how I’ve tracked these things in the past.
THE JOB:
We’ve made it really far! Now it’s time to put it all together.
From your list of top companies, choose one or two to start. Search their websites, dig through Indeed or LinkedIn for any job openings. Hone down onto the roles that best fit what you’re looking for as we discussed above.
If you don’t see anything that excites you, that’s okay! Move onto the next companies until you find something that really speaks to you. If you aren’t actually excited about a potential job, then it’s probably not the right one for you so keep looking! There’s no sense in applying to 100+ jobs that you don’t actually want. When you get to the actual interviewing phase for a job/company you truly care about, it will give you an incredible advantage. Hiring managers can tell if you are genuinely excited about something and those are the kinds of employees they want.
Once you find a job DO NOT APPLY YET! We’ll get to that soon, I promise. First, there are a few things we need to do to make sure you will be the best candidate they see.
