Life Sciences Index from ZRG Partners: Hiring in Outsourcing and Services is Up

At the end of March, ZRG Partners will release its 2012 1st Quarter hiring results from its Life Sciences Index. If trends continue from its last report, 2011 Q4, the pharmaceutical and outsourcing/services sector for life sciences sectors are in for good news. At that point, the hiring index was up 14.1%.

The ZRG Partners Global Life Science hiring index sectors are outlined as follows:

Pharmaceutical—includes $357 billion in revenues and comprises 804,000 employees from companies including AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, and Sanofi-Aventis.

Outsourcing/Services—includes $11 billion in revenues and comprises 80,000 employees from companies including Quintiles, Covance, PPD, Charles River Laboratories, ICON Clinical, Parexel, PharmaNet, PRA International, and inVentiv Health/i3.

By sector, at the end of 2011, ZRG Partners reported that the Outsourcing and Services sector was the “clear story in the quarter,” with a 39% increase in new jobs over Q3. Of the individual CROs, the hiring leader was Quintiles. For Pharmaceutical sector a 13.64% growth worldwide was reported, with Novartis topping the jobs in each of the three regions tracked in the index.

Regionally, the America’s posted a 12.42% increase in new roles and ended the year with a historically high level of job opportunities across all of the sectors. Unfortunately, the EU countries posted a 5.6% drop. However, this region still managed to keep percentage change within reasonable ranges given the market uncertainty of all the economies of that area. The Asia-Pac region retreated at year end, but this did follow three straight quarters of solid and consistent job postings from index companies.

By job function
Specialty functional areas were noted mostly in the areas of information technology, finance, general, and executive positions, as noted in the chart.

The Medical Device and Supply sector, of which ZRG also follows in the Life Science Index, was down 20% for the quarter, but more significantly was at the lowest levels of the seven quarter history of the index.