The biotech industry enjoys a lot of political clout in Washington D.C. and state capitals largely because it attracts highly educated people into high-paying jobs. But I spotted an intriguing bit of data this week that suggests biotech workers aren’t really taking home nearly as much money as some of the industry’s lobbyists and political allies would like people to believe.
The median salary for biotech jobs in the Pacific Northwest was $60,520 in 2008, according to data collected by Phil Ness, the owner of Seattle-based Info.Resource, a company that operates websites for biotech associations in all 50 states. That’s nowhere near the $81,499 average annual salary figure for Washington state biotech workers that was touted earlier this spring by a group sponsored by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).
The higher of the two wage figures, as you might expect, gets a lot more publicity from industry advocates, although Gov. Chris Gregoire has recently started backing off on her public statements about biotechnology as a regional catalyst for high-wage jobs. Even so, her Web site still states, “This industry will offer many Washingtonians family-wage jobs while finding cures for some of the world’s most dreaded diseases.”
The savvy reader will notice immediately that I’m comparing two different surveys with different methodologies, which is an apples-and-oranges comparison. Fair point. But it’s still worth hearing about the Ness study, especially since the higher salary figure tends to get so much more mainstream press attention.
Ness used a simple model to arrive at his median salary figure of about $60,000. His websites provide links to open job listings in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta. He asked the employers in those places to voluntarily provide him an actual salary range of the open job, as long as he kept the employer’s name blinded in the analysis. Only a small percentage—less than 10 percent—agreed to provide the range, but when they did, Ness settled on the midpoint within the range that was provided, and pooled together data from 360 actual job openings. Although his survey cast a wide net across states and provinces, about 90 percent of the openings were in Washington state, Ness says.
He also found some interesting disparities in terms of what skills are in demand, and which ones aren’t. Essentially, people with more commercial skills, like quality assurance for manufacturing, can make significantly more than entry-level scientists with pricey graduate school educations. Here are some average salaries Ness found for common biotech jobs:
—Clinical research associate—$69,278
