Poor job prospects and low pay have brought down the demand for biotechnology courses in many of the colleges across the country. The industry, educational institutes, research centres and human resource placement houses feel that the shortage of candidates and lack of trained personnel are the leading issues in human resources. According to a source, the attrition rate in the sector is estimated to be 35 per cent in 2006-07.

"Biotechnology in India is showing growth but the sector is yet to develop in the area of job opportunities, said Prof. G Padmanbahna, scientist and former director, Indian Institute of Science.

According to Dr. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, chairperson, Vision Group on Biotechnology and CMD, Biocon Limited, right candidate is essential for the success of a company. Shortage and poor quality manpower can be detrimental to a company's growth.

Referring to the manpower crisis, MN Vidyashankar IAS, secretary, department of Information Technology, Biotechnology and Science and Technology, Government of Karnataka, said, "Manpower crisis emanates from the biotech colleges, which are facing a decline in takers for admission because of poor job prospects. There is a disparity between industry requirements and the syllabus, simply leaving the candidates unemployable."

Training centres
Apart from the scores of colleges offering biotech graduation and post graduation courses, there are industry specific training centres like the state government initiated Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology (IBAB) and Biozeen, a knowledge process outsourcing company in the private sector. Biozeen offers courses for biopharmaceuticals and quality control documentation for industry specific requirements.

What is expected to make a difference is the state government funded India's first school for biotechnology, Karnataka Biotech Finishing School, being set up in the campus of People Education Society IT (PESIT) College in Bangalore. Expected to commence operations in July this year, it will train biotech graduates for the industry jobs. The school is expected to generate 5,000 to 10,000 trained manpower annually.

Indian bio-pharma job market
Job opportunities in pharmaceuticals are on the rise, thanks to the growing presence of global innovator and generic majors in the country both through mergers and acquisitions. IT companies like Wipro, Infosys and Accenture, which have ventured into data management in biosciences, are also in need of functional experts. Due to the increasing demand for manpower, companies are hiring extensively, noted Rahul Nene, senior consultant, pharma-biotech, Stanton Chase International in India.

The biotech job scenario in India is a high-value low-number arena. Most of the companies face two predicaments with regard to manpower. The first trouble revolves around getting persons with the right mix of experience, qualifications, technical know how and marketing skills. The second issue is that after gathering enough experience, training companies often lose the manpower, resulting in loss of time, effort and a blow on an upcoming project. While MNCs are grabbing qualified persons, small Indian players are wasting resources to build up trained manpower, said Yeshasvini Ramaswamy, head, e2e Business Solutions.

According to Nobby Nazareth, CEO, Nobby Nazareth Associates, "The job market is registering exponential growth in the outsourced research space, informatics and data management driven initiatives, apart from the product development area. Given the potential of the global opportunities in the Indian biotech space, job market is both aggressive and challenging."

"In the current scenario, the demand for experienced and good employees has actually exceeded the supply. In a situation such as this, higher salary structure poses a major challenge in controlling attrition levels in the industry. Moreover, the salary scale is not well defined. All this encourages companies offering higher salaries to dominate the scene. Though the salary is decided keeping in line with the market trends, the qualification, experience and the attitude of an individual play a major role in deciding the salary, noted Pandia Rajan, managing director, Ma Foi Management Consultants Ltd.

Right candidate
"Getting the right fit is extremely difficult especially for the faster growing smaller companies. Since the right candidate is not available in the market, they have to be trained and equipped for the job-profile. Part of the problem lies in the degree of specialisations required in fields like micro-array, genomics and other related areas. A biotechnology company requires subject specific qualified candidates with an MBA for business development in drug discovery. These are rare catch for Indian companies as multinational companies lure them with stupendous salaries, said Ramaswamy.

Finding the right people is a coercive effort in putting technical competency, personality match and culture relevant soft skills. Hence the task of finding the right people does not necessarily depend on the number of people available as much as it is on getting the right match from the lot, noted Nazareth.

It is difficult to get people in proteomics, medicinal chemistry, BA/BE studies and regulatory affairs. In marketing and sales there is attrition from one company to another. Culture issues do matter especially between MNCs and homegrown companies, said Nene.

Formation of right candidate
A combination of attitude, knowledge and commitment are the basic qualities for the right candidate. However, the candidate values money, scope of assignment and credibility of the organization.

When it comes to attracting talent, throwing fat carrots at potential employees would produce a boomerang effect for the company. Salaries, prerequisites or designations as retention tools can prove to be self-defeating since rivals can also follow the same path. Besides, HR experts from the industry believe that 'out-paying' is not a winning tactic for companies. An organization's reward strategy reflects its power to drive quality employees. Apart from salary, recognition of work is a healthy retention strategy. Performance is a primary requirement. Therefore, excellent performers should be valued. They should be identified, nurtured and provided with growth opportunity," said Rajan.

Attrition rates
The annual attrition rate of biotech sector is in the range of 30 to 35 per cent, said Pandia, adding that attrition is a serious issue in the industry as it is knowledge-based and employees are its assets.

Attrition varies from 8 per cent to 18 per cent across levels and sectors within pharma and biotech companies. CRM (Customer relationship management) and contract research and manufacture (CRAM) have the highest attrition followed by medical advisory services.

Naveen Kulkarni, CEO, Polyclone Biosciences said "Higher attrition rates are mainly in the service sector where many of the Indian and MNC companies are providing low cost manpower and contract research services. With the sudden explosion of the job market, manpower is expected to shift from one company to other. One of the ways the sector is trying to overcome the current developments is by establishing standard practices like GCP, GLP, GMP, accreditation and FDA approvals. These standards automatically ensure that the loss of an employee is minimal. When it comes to an R&D based organization like ours, mostly it will be focused on specific areas and generally attrition rates are lower. The candidate would be aware that this technology/research area is not found anywhere else and hence stays on."

Job opportunities
There is tremendous growth in specialized sectors including data mining, genomics data, biological data, clinical data, disease to DNA sequence level research and analysis, pointed out Ms. Ramaswami.

According to Pandia job opportunities are plenty in the departments of Research & Development, Quality control and Manufacturing/Production.