A recent article in Business Week caught my eye. It talks specifically about the biotech industry complaining that too many recent college graduates have little understanding of what was required of them in the real world.
Biotech’s Beef
The main complaint is that they lack some technical skills and have no understanding of the concepts of quality control and regulatory issues. I personally think there are several reasons for this and I’ll discuss each of them below.
Let’s first talk about colleges. There are two major reasons that colleges and universities don’t do a better job at preparing students for jobs in technical fields such as biotech. In regard to technical skills, many colleges do not have the sophisticated equipment needed to train their students. Money is a constant problem and my personal experience is that the equipment in colleges and universities is sometimes decades out of date. This is especially true for expensive equipment. When I was studying as an undergraduate in the early 1980’s, we didn’t even have a working mass spectrometer to use in the advanced analytical lab. We barely had an NMR (60 MHz continuous wave). When I went to graduate studies at a large state university known for its chemistry program, the situation was much better, but still many of the day-to-day instruments such as the gas chromatography equipment was from the 1970’s, although we did have access to high filed FT-NMR.
The second reason that colleges and universities don’t do a better job has to do with make up of those teaching, i.e. the professors. My experience is that many of them have never spent anytime in industry so how can they teach what they don’t know or understand themselves? My personal experience was that in tens years of college, none of the science professors I took a class from or who I knew had ever held a job in industry. They all had graduated, gone on to a post-doc position, and eventually worked in a college or university. It is practically impossible to talk about topics such as the regulatory environment or quality control without any experience in those areas.
In some cases it goes beyond jut not knowing; there are some who seem to have an attitude of contempt for those in industry who may express a desire to teach. Many professors have a certain disdain for industry and those outside their small cliche. As an example, a small community college in my area had an opening for a chemistry professor. I applied and was told that I they had “grave concerns” about my teaching abilities since I hadn’t “taught” for over 14 years. I replied that although I had not taught in a college or university since my graduate school days, I did a lot of teaching in my community, my church, my corporate life and even taught paid training courses in my own consulting business. This didn’t count according to them. They seemed to feel that the lack of teaching experience in the exact environment of a college outweighed the practical, real world experiences I could bring from industry. After several months of not hearing form them, I called and was told they had forgotten about my application and would send me a notice in the mail soon. A couple of days later, I received a very short rejection notice.
All though universities and colleges are to blame for much, some of that blame also lies with biotechs themselves. In many cases, they seem to want fully trained robots that they employ without difficulty. One of the first things cut in down times at companies are the training budgets. Also, there is much talk about employee loyalty and that if they train someone, they will leave for another job before they benefit from the training. This may be true, but, when this is brought up to me, I always ask when was the last time they had a lay-off due to a temporary set back. Invariably within the last 16 months or so they have had some sort of major “restructuring” which included people losing their jobs. Today, companies that complain about employee loyalty but then have lay-offs every time there is a down turn, have no room to complain. To make matters those who have to find other jobs,find upper management at their former company gets rewarded for getting rid of employees?!
Then end result of the short-term short-sightedness of many companies is that the employees are over-worked and pay doesn’t keep up with the increased responsibilities. The motto of corporations today seems to be” do more with less for less”. This means that those workers don’t have the chance to work as an adjunct professor at their local college or university (see my ideas for improving this situation below).
Here are a few of my ideas for improving the situation.
- Allow industry folks to have a sabbatical to teach in a local college. This could be for just a portion of a semester or quarter; maybe three or four weeks.
- Industry should encourage colleges to hire adjunct industry faculty (see #1 above). They could earmark money for equipment and then set up a schedule for them to have access to that equipment. At a former university I attended this was done successfully. The company helped purchase a new high-field NMR and in return, they were given one day a week full access to the machine. Then they also did not have to worry about routine maintenance. That was taken care of by the university.
- Industry needs to set up and effectively run programs to give students industrial experience. This is more than just allowing an intern to flounder for 6 weeks in one of their labs. THere needs to be a culture of showing students what the industry is about if industry is serious about solving this problem.
- Expose college faculty to industrial positions. Encourage industry to accept professors during their sabbatical to learn about the industry and the various roles needed. This also means industry has to be willing to give this sort of experience to professors.
I am hopeful that the situation can be improved, but it requires more than just talking from both sides. There is a need to implement these sorts of programs in order to keep America competitive in an increasing technological society.
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