Bio Career Center

September 28, 2007 | A new online jobs service officially opens next week, offering students and staff at a group of prominent universities and medical schools access to hot jobs and resources in a variety of alternative careers.

Nicholas Folger, the president of Bio Career Center, says the stimulus for building the company was “the need for expansion of availability and information for postdocs, PhDs and MDs to find alternative careers.” Postdocs, says Folger, have been taking jobs that “aren’t a good fit, taking jobs that aren’t their passion.”

Folger teamed up with Michael Alvarez, who manages the Stanford Medical School career center, to provide a source of tailored information for highly educated medical professionals to research alternative careers. Bio Career Center provides “a jobs board dedicated to postgrads. Other resources are spread out over all sciences, but life sciences is where the over-supply is.”

“There’s a shift going on,” continues Folger. “A PhD is no longer a precursor to the academic world, it’s a precursor to a wider range of fascinating possibilities. It’s not like the best and brightest [always] go to academia.”

Bio Career Center has built a consortium with six leading universities so far: UCSF, Berkeley, Stanford, University of Washington, Caltech, and Penn. Access to the site is restricted to students and staff affiliated with pre-registered universities.

“We started on the West Coast,” says Folger, a Stanford MBA and former Bay Area executive and private investor. “The response so far has been terrific. I expect to double the number of universities using our site within the next year.”

The site is largely funded by employers who post job openings. A postdoc position costs just $50; internship positions are free. There are some 400 jobs posted as of the official launch of the site on October 1st. The registered universities pay an “annual commitment fee.”

The site contains career articles and resources in more than 40 categories. As for the job postings, as of last week there were more than 250 positions in biopharma research, and more than 100 listed in academia. There were 35 openings at Novartis, 29 at Genentech, 21 at GlaxoSmithKline and 11 at Amgen. On the other hand, there was just 1 at Merck and l at Pfizer.

However, despite the site’s intent to offer an array of alternative careers, there were no jobs listed in financing or law. Or science writing.