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BIG PHARMACEUTICAL FIRMS are on the hunt for graduates that have ‘soft skills’ such as teamwork and problem solving, according to a new report.
The report was carried out by the Expert Group on Future Skills Needs (EGFSN), a group set up to advise the government on labour market issues.
It is estimated that there could be as many as 8,400 job openings over the next five years in the Irish biopharma industry due to a mix of retirements, people leaving the sector and companies looking to ramp up hiring.
However, the group found that there needs to be several changes enacted to help Irish graduates secure jobs with these businesses, including “improving the alignment of education and skills provision with the needs of the biopharma industry”.
It said that companies cite a lack of ‘soft skills’ among graduates. Soft skills are personal attributes that help people to interact effectively in the workplace, such as leadership, working in teams and communications.
Soft skills
“It was felt by industry stakeholders that the quality of graduates is variable, especially with respect to interpersonal skills,” the report said.
Embedding the development of ‘soft skills’ into programmes and through work experience would help produce more balanced skill sets.
It added: “The ‘cultural fit’ of an individual within an organisation is also important. In many cases this revolves around the ‘soft skills’ competences that companies are looking for such as showing initiative, taking responsibility (and) communication skills.
A person with the required technical qualifications also needs to be able to demonstrate the above qualities.
The report also said that work placements in biopharma companies should typically run for between six and nine months.
Work placements
“Companies consider that a three-month placement is too short for them and that the student only becomes useful after six months’ work experience,” it said.
“It was concluded that structured placements should be at least 6–9 months duration.
“The optimal time for placements would be at the end of the third year of a degree programme so that students would have gained the learning to make the placement most valuable.”
Jobs Minister Minister Mitchell O’Connor noted that the biopharma sector “employs over 28,000 people and creates significant secondary employment in construction and other services when investment in new plants is under way”.
“The report into the future skills needs of the sector will help industry and government to take the necessary steps to ensure that skills supply to the sector can be met.”
Other recommendations made in the report include a suggestion that companies expand their graduate-entry development programmes and the possibility for the government to develop a new biopharma apprenticeship and career traineeship for those on jobseeker’s courses.
Written by Paul O’Donoghue and posted on Fora.ie
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Drop the iPhone and get a personality in other words.
Soft skills can be learned much more easily in crappy part time jobs during school and college instead as part of a course. If someone had tried to teach me communication skills in college it would’ve gone right over my head. But if there’s a load of screaming customers and chefs, you’d quickly figured the auld communication thing out.
Still waiting on me cappuccino, Aoife…
Went for a job in Pfizer the other day. Got the standard rejection letter saying they were going to pursue stronger candidates for the role. May aswell have said ‘do you even lift bro?’. Soft skills my ass!!
Or else they where actually looking for a stonger candidate.
Or else they where actually looking for a stonger candidate.
Vincent Wallace – stating the obvious there sunshine :-D
Twice no less!
How can new graduates get the work experience they need when companies aren’t willing to hire new graduates? Rather than complaining that NEW graduates are lacking skills gained by work experience give them work experience. Universities provide an excellent knowledge base and can’t be expected to provide everything.
Cue the “big pharma” comments from hippies.
Big farmers need to stop polluting mannn
Just to let you all know. Wallys in bed at the moment but don’t worry he will be writing an essay about the neo liberal agenda of big pharma in the comments soon ! Patience everyone
Ah sure it’s great to be working in an industry where I can walk our of my job in the morning and be working again within days for better pay. Pharma companies offer good money and good benefits. Soft skills me hole they won’t help when your in the middle of a major audit or trying to solve a critical problem protein folding
Imagine wasting your life working for Big Pharma! Pharmaceutical companies who sell legal drugs to the public for huge profits. There more interested in quantity over quality. They over charge on cancer drugs. They dodge tax. The big problem is that their research is needed now more than ever and with antibiotics being overused and overprescribed graduate s are needed now.
They spend more on marketing than research and they appropriate most of their scientific research from academia.
“Please Mel Gibson, Kill all the hippies”! Cartman
Spend more on marketing than research? Yeah that’s straight up wrong. And I for one welcome whatever good drugs they’re willing to make unless you two have a better option?
Titus you are straight up wrong. Just do a couple of minutes research and you’ll find it’s true, and in a big way!
I’m a research scientist and a patient of a high tech drug. I think I’m OK, the bbz. It takes often upwards of a billion dollars to bring a drug to market. With that billions are also lost on the shelved drugs along the way. So you better get cracking….
You can find many different reliable sources but here’s one.
Marketing is also a uniquely American problem, when it comes to drugs. You will notice the conspicuous absence of ads for drugs on the telly while you’re sipping your milkshake.
Businesses want to make profit – shocker. That’s how capitalism works folks.
The point is that without the massive companies doing this research for huge profits, we wouldn’t be able to research life saving medicines and nobody would have them.
Pharma can be a rip off, but it’s far better than the alternative.
And the marketing that’s being referred to isn’t the marketing you or I know for say, Apple. Marketing for pharmaceuticals in the US means samples, doctors visits, reps, potential patient days. You try to push a drug in the US without aggressive marketing. You won’t recover your profits and you will quickly lose out to competitors. I’m not saying it’s a great system but unless there’s something like NICE brought in in the US it won’t change.
My point still remains, they don’t do as much research as people think and they appropriate a lot of scientific knowledge from predominately government funded research in universities. They pay a token percentage of the research funding with governmental bodies on state level and EU level providing the majority of the funding.
If we give more funding to our colleges and universities they could do more in relation to research and development. This would mean that we could develop our own generic drugs, free from the insidious pay to delay deals that these big pharmaceutical companies negotiate.
We do not need to market drugs that are essential to the well-being of the public, they should be free or at least affordable. We need to have health system that works for the people that use it, not shareholders.
Darren that’s what actually happens except our government essentially gives up any rights to the results from research and hands them over to industry to profit from. It’s madness, but then again we couldn’t trust our government to utilise the research findings so we have to opt for big industry.
Not to mention, when they do engage in research and development they get a 25% tax credit. To claim this tax credit you do not have to have a team of scientist in a lab, “…any company that spends money trying to improve a product or service through a technological advance, using qualified staff and appropriate project controls, and where there’s an element of doubt about the project’s success, is likely to be eligible.”
You need to read this if you think the free market produces the best outcomes in healthcare.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/salim-lamrani/cubas-health-care-system-_b_5649968.html
Who cares if they don’t do as much as research as the public think? What do the public know about research? They have no idea about the simplist aspects of science, their opinions on how scientists do science is completely irrelevant. I also don’t particularly care for doctors opinions on accounting, as a matter a fact. Not your monkey, not your circus, so to speak.
I’ve mentioned on here a million times that Ireland should be making generic medicines. Think of the jobs that would create and the money the HSE would save.
“Cultural fit” means being manipulable, tow the company line , put the company first and put you with all the other mindless robots in their workforce. If you aren’t malleable you won’t get the job that’s why young people are preferable.
Soft skills? ahahaha, I wish these human resources knew what the word WORK means.
teamwork = forget who you are: you are a human resource
problem solving = just follow the bloody procedure
It is indeed very difficult to find multi-taskers with a blend of technical competency and great communication skills.
Don’t many in the industry even oppose legalisation of cannabis for medicinal use ? Sure profits will always take priority its no ‘hippy talk ‘
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