biotechnicians
sporte | November 12, 2008What skills does a biotechnology technician need to know?
This seems like a simple question, but people have been struggling to define biotech skill standards since the early 90's.
Complicating this question is that many areas of biotechnology require somewhat different skills. Antibody work requires one set, plant or animal tissue culture, another; fermentation, another; manufacturing, another; DNA sequencing, yet another set. Even skills that you might think are universal, like using a microscope, are not. During my years in graduate school, I never used a microscope; I cloned genes…
sporte | May 29, 2008"Why won't biotech companies hire people with Ph.D.s to be technicians?"
"I already have a Ph.D., how do I find a job?"
These were some of the questions that commenters left after my earlier posts (here, here and here) on biotechnology workforce shortages.
Unfortunately, for these students and post-docs, the shortfall of employees in the biotech industry is largely a shortfall of technicians. It is a sad thing that promoting science careers can have the unintended consequence of creating a surplus of unhappy post-docs and even more unhappy graduate students. Perversely, many of the…