The pandemic shook up nearly every facet of modern life, including employees’ views of what they value at work. In a trend dubbed the “Great Resignation” or the “Great Attrition,” about 47.4 million workers quit their jobs in 2021, and more than 4 million people have quit their jobs each month this year. At the end of June (the latest month with available data), 10.7 million jobs were open in the US, down 5.6% from 11.3 million in May but up 9.2% from 9.8 million in June of 2021, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And industries that rely on labs aren’t immune. The Bureau reported over 2 million healthcare and social services job openings and 790,000 manufacturing job openings at the end of June. As of July 22, job postings on the hiring platform Indeed.com are up nearly 68% for positions in scientific R&D, 78% for medical technicians, and 90.5% for positions in production and manufacturing compared with pre-pandemic levels in February 2020. Some large companies that profited during the pandemic expanded; for example, Johnson & Johnson grew 7.2% from 132,200 to 141,700 employees between 2019 and 2021.* Other companies have seen their ranks decrease Pfizer’s numbers dropped 10.5% from 88,300 to 79,000 employees in the same time frame.
“We are suffering, along with the rest of the country, from the ‘where-are-the-workers’ syndrome,” says Jan Hudson, partner and CEO of Surf Search, a recruiting firm in San Diego, CA, that specializes in health care, medical devices, and the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. The pandemic is mostly to blame, Hudson says, and employees are now looking for remote work and other perks.
Before the pandemic, employers weren’t paying close enough attention to retention, says Chris Clancy, associate vice president and practice director in Life Sciences and Biotechnology at Boston, MA-based recruiting firm HireMinds. A report published in July by McKinsey & Company found that 54% of respondents working in healthcare or pharmaceuticals who quit their jobs between April 2020 and April 2022 did not return to that same industry, citing a lack of opportunities for career development or advancement and inadequate compensation as top reasons for quitting. Clancy says many employers are now desperate to fill spots at their lab benches.
For the candidates who stuck around the lab and are now looking for jobs, their wish lists are long. Ample time off and stock options are high on jobseekers must-have lists, Hudson says. But many prospective employees are looking for hybrid or fully remote work options above all, a tricky proposition for lab-based work. “You can’t culture cells from home,” Clancy says.
Because of the premium placed on remote work, “good lab hands are hard to find,” he says.
Even if a potential staffer is aware they’ll need to be physically at the bench, they often are looking for leadership to be in-person too, says Carla Yacoub, senior scientific recruiting associate at Boston-area firm Sci.bio Recruiting. “It may be a challenge for these companies to encourage their senior leadership to be on-site as much as they can,” she says.
Outsourcing wet lab work to CROs might play a growing role, says Aly Budny, senior marketing and scientific recruiting associate, also with Sci.bio. “Instead of executing experiments in a lab setting, scientists now design and troubleshoot experiments that are fully executed at a CRO, outside of their company’s lab,” she says, enabling them to work remotely.
Along with research associates and lab technicians, both Hudson and Clancy also see companies struggle to recruit bioinformaticians or other data scientists to their ranks. But while the pandemic has been hard on labs, Clancy points out that laboratories have proved now, more than ever, to be necessary. “These are the employees who were obviously essential in making the [COVID-19] vaccine and improving outcomes for antiviral pills,” he says. “The industry is still healthy and vital.”
*According to our estimates, only about 9% of the increase in employee numbers is attributable to acquisitions.