Bioscience Job Training Opportunities

Cuyahoga Community College President Dr. Jerry Sue Thornton announced last week the College has received a grant for $447,000 from the Ohio Board of Regents to develop a Bioscience Workforce Training and Assessment Center. The Center—the first of its kind in the state—aims to train hundreds of workers to combat ongoing bioscience worker shortages in Northeast Ohio.

The Bioscience Workforce Training Center will be located at Tri-C’s Unified Technologies Center, 2415 Woodland Avenue in Cleveland. Equipment will begin to be installed, and the first training programs are set to start, in January 2008.

Bioscience is defined as the design, manufacture and distribution of medical devices, pharmaceutical drug creation and drug packaging (the healthcare sector is a separate industry). The Center will focus on training and assessing workers for local companies involved in producing these products. There are more than 20,000 bioscience industry jobs in Northeast Ohio, and that number is expected to grow significantly over the next few years. Currently, at least 1,500 bioscience positions in Northeast Ohio have gone unfilled due to the lack of trained workers.

“Greater Cleveland and Ohio have become leaders in medical device and pharmaceutical drug development, manufacturing and distribution. By training more workers for this rising local industry, we will help grow a very bright sector of the region’s economy even further,” said Dr. Thornton. “These are good jobs, with open positions that local companies need to fill,” said Dr. Craig T. Follins, Tri-C’s Executive Vice President of Workforce and Economic Development. “The Center will develop employees who have the skills that local bioscience businesses need.”

A report by BioOhio in 2006 found that more than half of the 775 bioscience companies in Ohio are located in Greater Cleveland. The same survey reported that the average bioscience salary at northeast Ohio companies was $47,563.