Biotech in Australia: jobs galore?
If you're an IT professional interested in the booming bio-IT world, the "absolute" amount of work available is still small, warned Robert Olivier, director of Olivier e-cruitment Advisors.
Olivier said there are very few opportunities in this sector which were advertised on the Internet--where most IT professionals would begin their search.
"For pure programming roles in the pharmeceutical or biotech sectors, no specialist knowledge or qualifications will be required but for a business analyst role (where you are interpreting user needs for the programmers) knowledge of the biotech sector and/or a degree in a life science will be ideal," Olivier said.
"There's not many people in bioinformatics with a solid training in IT or mathematics," Emphron Informatics' Thomas observed. "Most of the people working in bioinformatics started off in biology and become computer literate biologists rather than moving in the opposite direction."
Thomas said if IT professionals were interested in systems development and systems architecture, they would probably have to look overseas for work since there wasn't much large scale system development in Australia.
"There are plenty of support roles," Thomas noted. "There's a real risk [for] people going into bioinformatics. It's mostly public sector, and that means career development and progression are mostly based on authorship of papers."
He refers to the practice among universities and other public sector scientific institutions to judge employees based on how many papers they had published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and promote them accordingly. According to Thomas, a person entering bioinformatics without a biology background would most likely be a fourth author on a series of papers, and that wouldn't be enough to gain promotion.
"Once you get into a support role in a research environment then your oppurtunities for advancement go down dramatically," he said.
The biggest demand in the market at the moment is for small-scale, high-value consulting probably because there aren't many people with the right background, according to Thomas.
"There are some Australian companies which are absolutely at the forefront," said Thomas. "Having said that, you can count them on one hand--the bulk are in the public sector, and the job oppurtunities are not going to be attractive to most IT graduates."
| Intro |
 |
|
State of play |
|
|
Life and science |
| |
Jobs galore |
| |
Equipment and services |
