European R&D Job Vacancy Data Offer Corporate Insights
This article was originally published in Scrip
The UK and Germany accounted for just over half of all Pharma R&D vacancies in Europe last year, representing 29% of the total versus 25%, respectively, while Switzerland came in a distant third place with 12%, according to the recently published Vacancysoft/Clinical Professionals report on trends in life science R&D.
The survey, which tries to assess activity in R&D roles and identify hotspots, found that after Switzerland there was a steep tail off, with the next grouping of Denmark, France, and Belgium each accounting for at least 4% of all R&D vacancies. The Netherlands, Ireland, Austria, and Sweden accounted for just over 2% of all openings each. After these countries came 15 more countries with Italy being the biggest of those, but in total they accounted for less than 9% of all job vacancies.
Novartis, Roche and Bayer were the main drivers in European R&D recruitment last year, the report found. Novartis and Roche together accounted for 48% of the R&D job market in Switzerland. These two companies actively recruited in other countries as well, as Swiss vacancies accounted for only about 50% of their R&D activity.
"Vacancies are a function of corporate strategy; it's a function of their investment decisions," noted James Chaplin, Vacancysoft's CEO. "So you can use vacancies posted by pharma companies and compare them with their peer groups to see where the concentrations of their hiring are happening against the industry average," he told Scrip in an interview.
Interestingly, Danish insulin giant Novo Nordisk AS was the only company that limited its entire R&D recruitment activity to one country: Denmark.
The survey's approach divided the broad pharmaceutical market into three sub-sectors: traditional pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology companies, and clinical research organizations. Of these three, traditional pharmaceutical companies are by far the most important, having advertised nearly 80% of all vacancies in 2015.
The top 10 companies in traditional pharma have mostly focused their R&D recruitment in the Nordic and Germanic territories – those companies being Novartis, Roche, Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Merck Group, Johnson & Johnson, Novo Nordisk, Boehringer Ingelheim and UCB.
But the top five CROs were mostly focused in the British Isles. Only Eurofins Scientific countered this trend. Eurofins is by far the most active recruiter among CROs, and just under half of its vacancies last year were in Germany, the report said.
The rising importance and inherent complexity of biosimilars is also mirrored in vacancy statistics, Vacancysoft's Chaplin said. "It means that companies like Teva [Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.] increasingly commission CROs, and that CROs are seeing that as part of their service offering now, to actually do the testing to get the viable biological drug. We're seeing that in the R&D job vacancy data."