—Quality assurance—$68,720
—Quality control—$51,292
—Research associate—47,500
This analysis by Ness leaves out what people who are currently holding down jobs are making, and doesn’t include the really big fish like C-level executives who get paid well into the six-figures—the sort of outlier data points that can inflate an average. That’s why Ness used a median, in which half of the salaries were higher and half were lower, because that sort of analysis is less prone to being skewed.
Ness, a bit of a biotech history buff who likes to track the genealogy of the local biotech cluster, told me he didn’t really see any big surprises in the data this year. He’s been using this survey method since 2004, and he was just starting to look for long-term trends when we spoke earlier this week. But at first glance, he isn’t seeing much higher wages now than he did five years ago.
One thing that did jump out at Ness is an increasing number of jobs for things like quality assurance and quality control—the kind of people that biotech companies don’t need in their earliest days, but that are needed as a company matures and gets closer to the marketplace with a new drug. That trend is consistent with the job openings I saw last night on the website of Seattle-based Dendreon (NASDAQ: [[ticker:DNDN]]), which has 22 of its 82 current job openings for people with quality control and quality assurance in their title.
That’s not the glamorous sort of stuff of Eureka moments and snazzy industry recruiting videos, but they are vitally important to the success of companies and shouldn’t be overlooked, Ness says. “Community colleges find it especially interesting,” he says.
You can check out some of Ness’s data, which he’s posted here.
