Latest / BioSpace / Bonus: Q1 2026 Job Market Update
Transcript
- BioSpace: you Hi Angela, thanks so much for joining me. So I'm Chantal Dresser. I'm the VP of marketing over at Biospace. My team largely oversees our salary reports, our employment outlook reports, as well as our quarterly job market updates. And I'm here today with Angela Gabriel, our ⁓ editor at Biospace who covers careers, the life sciences job market, layoffs, ⁓ all of these fun, interesting topics that impact the biopharma workforce. So we've just published our 2026 Q1 job market update for Career Insider, which is available now and free for all Career Insider subscribers. So Angela, can you talk us through what happened to the biofarm and job market so far this year? Sure, happy to. So I will say if I'm a biofarmer professional and I'm looking for a job right now, I think I would find, I believe this data that Biospace just came out with pretty encouraging. So even though we found that job posting is live on our website, we're fairly flat year over year in the first quarter, they actually picked up every month. So they dropped 15 % from January, 2025 to January, 2026, but then they were up year over year in February and in March, rising 5 % in February and then 7 % March. And also we've now had two consecutive quarter over quarter jumps in jobs live. Now, if we wanna look at continued kind of industry activity that we find is positive. I think it's been encouraging that we've seen a few different things happening that hopefully maybe signal the job market is going to turn around at some point soon. I know everybody wants it to turn around sooner than later. I know a lot of people are expecting it, including industry experts expecting it to turn around later this year. So as we look for that to happen, we're also taking a look at certain things such as IPOs. So we saw seven IPOs already in the first quarter. Last year, according to our biospace tallies, we only had eight for the entire year. So we're already off to a really strong start there. And then we always keep an eye on our layoff tracker and how many layoffs there have been. And we saw a really big decrease year over year if we want to look at how many companies were either cutting or projecting they're going to cut employees. So that number dropped from 74 in Q1 of 2025 to 35 in Q1 of 2026. Now I do have to say, The effective headcount it was higher for quarter one of this year. 6593 people and that compares to 5926 last year, so that is, you know, a difference, but about half of that headcount is tied to one company. So a company named Viatris plans to cut 10 % of its workforce and we're estimating that could affect about 3000 people given the company recently said that they have over 30,000 employees. Right? I mean, will say, you know, setting that number aside, I think it's been a really pleasant surprise when we monitor layoffs this year. It's been really great to see this year over year decrease in how many companies are cutting their workforces. And I remember, and you probably remember this too, earlier this year we were talking, putting together our Career Insider newsletter. I took a look at the layoff tracker and I realized this is the exact same headline we had a week ago. So we hadn't even updated. Yeah, which is great. We had not updated that tracker in a week. And so we didn't even put it in the newsletter that week. And in my two years here at Biospace, I'd never seen that happen before. So. Yeah, it definitely feels like there's been a slowdown in those announcements, which is encouraging and does feel a lot better. What about what's happening in the overall job market too and how that's having an impact on biofarma? Yeah, I will say there were some encouraging signs there. The Bureau of Labor Statistics put out that in March the US added about 178,000 jobs and that was way overestimate. So know fact sheet, for example, have predicted 60,000. And if we want to look at some info that's a little bit more specific to the biofarm industry, BLS reported that for the professional and business services sector, and that includes scientific services, there were 2000 additional positions last month. Unfortunately, not every single number that BLS released was actually encouraging. So the other thing that happened in March was the number of discouraged workers who believe jobs are not available to them anymore. That actually went up by 144,000 to 510,000. So, I mean, in addition to layoffs that we were just kind of talking about in general, biopharma hiring, know, were there any other trends that you noticed in the last quarter? Yeah, you know, if we want to look at where we're seeing those biofarm and job opportunities right now, I think we should talk about contract work. We took a look at kind of the year over year landscape for that. And from March 2025 to March 2026, contract job postings live on the Biospace website went up 94%. Wow. Yeah, compare that to full time roles. They went up 5%. So that's a pretty big difference. Interesting. Yeah, and actually contract work is one of the things that we touched on when we had our February webinar about hiring trends and job market signals. One of our panelists, Eric Celedonio, he's the founder and managing partner of Sly.bio recruiting. He told us that contract work is picked up mainly because companies, just don't have enough employees to get the work done. So they're using contractors to bridge the gap until they can hire more people. So for any biopharma professionals who are open to contract work, they should be seeing an increasing number of those opportunities in the job market. And based on a LinkedIn poll that we had in February, where we looked at whether biopharma professionals had taken any contract work in the past year, there are definitely people who would accept this type of work arrangement moving forward. We saw that 32 % of respondents had contract positions in the past year, and 40 % of those who didn't. contract with companies during that time so that they would actually consider doing that in the future. Right. And like any other kind of industry notes or any other kind of fields that, you know, had movement of note? You know, manufacturing, we're definitely taking a look at, and I know these jobs are not going to materialize immediately. It's kind of more long term thing, but the Trump administration trying to incentivize domestic drug production, we're continuing to see biopharmers expanding their US manufacturing capabilities, which of course results in new facilities that are being built or expanded on and new jobs. So during the first quarter alone, AbbVie, Eli Lilly, Genentech, or I think it's Genentech, my apologies if that's wrong. Johnson & Johnson and Novartis, they all announced that they're going to add nearly 2000 manufacturing positions within the next few years at facilities that they're building across the US. As far as when those are going to come online, unfortunately, the company whose new roles are going to come to fruition sooner than later is Novartis, but that's not really happening until 2028. So they just announced in February that Denton, Texas is where they're going to put their fifth radiopharmaceutical manufacturing facility. But again, it's not gonna be fully operational probably until 2028. And that should generate anywhere from 150 to 175 jobs. And some of those positions would include, for example, process engineers, quality control analysts, and maintenance technicians. But that is like quite a long time to wait. So I don't think anyone's gonna be sitting and twiddling their thumbs and waiting for that to open. But thank you for sharing. That was very useful. And I mean, People always want to know what do you think is going to happen over the next few months? What are we going to see? Yeah, you know, if I were to pull out a crystal ball, ⁓ I can't say for sure, obviously, but I'm hopeful that we're going to see another year over year increase in job postings live on our website. And I'm hopeful that we're going to have another drop in the number of companies who are either making or planning to cut their workforce. If that happens, I think I'll be ready at that point to move from being cautiously optimistic about a job market turnaround happening this year to just optimistic. Well, fingers crossed. Yeah, OK, well, thanks Angela. That was great. ⁓ Good update and thanks so much and looking forward to the next one in Q2. Yep, thanks Chantal.