Nordic Life Science 1
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creasing the number of companies offering practical placements, and ensuring students are taking on more challenging projects at these companies the companies are beginning to see firsthand that the students are very competent and motivated to learn.” From Arvidsson’s perspective, “Even an already experienced person needs time to adjust and learn when a business expands and develops in new areas. A newly graduated person will probably take a bit longer than a more experienced person, but if a company has the capacity to hire and train a talent this may even be beneficial in terms of loyalty and retention.” Hanna Sandvall suggests that too many companies are searching for senior competence today and are missing the emerging talents that, granted, need more training, but are essential for securing the future talents in the sector. “We need to invest more time to connect with academic institutions to inspire young talent and make the bright life science future more tangible,” she says. If we look to the north of Sweden, Jennie Ekbeck, CEO at Umeå Biotech Incubator has worked tirelessly to build better connections between companies and academia as one method of solving the skills supply problems in Umeå. For Ekbeck much of the journey to solve skills shortage is about changing the mindset of the industry, and she is certainly not afraid to hold companies accountable in playing their part in this. “In Umeå we could see that companies were stealing from each other far too much, so we needed to confront the issue. It is not something that can be achieved overnight, however slowly but surely companies in the region are beginning to understand that they have much more to gain by looking more at what is needed to move someone from junior to senior rather than fixating on the need to hire only senior competence. We challenge them to consider – what is the very basic knowledge needed for the position and look more at the drive and motivation to achieve the same outcome,” she says. A hire for attitude and train for skills philosophy is not new. Many high impact organizations have long adopted this hiring model whereby character counts for more than credentials. For SMEs, however this strategy can be costly, and many simply don’t have the luxury of available resources to train and upskill juniors. Ekbeck suggests that a smart way to build competence can be for non-competing companies to run trainee programs together. “This is especially important given the competence engines we once had in Sweden no longer exist. This is precisely what has occurred with the three In Vitro Diagnostics (IVD) companies operating in Umeå – they aggregate each other’s competence and have a pay it forward mentality,” Ekbeck says. Globally we see a trend of life science companies increasingly making public-private partnerships (PPPs) a bigger focus of their business strategies. Although these come with their challenges, if executed in the right way, they provide the perfect example of an innovative and high-value collaboration model which is so important in building a sustainable health ecosystem. Denmark has a long tradition of PPPs. Already in the 1930s and 40s the Danish public healthcare system and private organizations realized that they could benefit from closer cooperation, the then Nordic Insulin Laboratory (today Novo Nordisk) was a pioneer in this space, even if the cooperation between public authorities and industry was less formal at the time. Jenni Nordborg believes that PPPs are a very important way of working to grow new talent and skills for the life science sector and something she hopes we will see more of in the coming years. She refers to the Testa Center, a bioprocess pilot-scale facility in Uppsala, a collaboration between Vinnova and Cytiva to improve the future of biological medicines. “It is a perfect example of Sweden looking for ways to make use of existing competence within both public and private sectors and academia,” she says. The Testa Center CAREERS