This year, 2008, has been difficult for many companies in many sectors. The economic tide has been sweeping negatively across many of the world’s markets and causing business confidence to wane. The life science markets have not been immune and the impact has been palpable in many corners of the sector.

The biotech industry has come under increased pressure as the climate for early stage ventures has become even more challenging. Toxicity in the finance markets has made fundraising through venture capital, private equity and structured debt-financing extremely difficult. A lack of support for listed biotech stocks have led to incredibly low volumes of share trading on many of Europe’s exchanges, meaning the IPO and exit opportunities for investors are heavily restricted. Merger and acquisition activities have continued unabated and significant deals can be seen between biotech and large-pharma, often at premium values over current market capitalisation, further fuelling the belief that exits are currently best achieved via these trade-sale routes.

This sentiment is echoed across other parts of the sector where significant efforts are being undertaken to re-organise many of the industry’s hallmark names in an attempt to bring about greater efficiency, boost R&D and reduce the impact of patent expiration. Yet among these challenges are pockets of real success, companies growing rapidly, businesses being merged to forge new powerful entities, products being approved, relationships between pharma and biotech thriving.

This challenging environment calls upon different skills and experience and there is currently a re-ordering of hiring priorities across the European life science markets. Career management in the current sector requires you to be bold, clear about your direction and confident in bringing success to your next job. There are disciplines that are continuing to see good rates of vacancies and this requirement illustrates that capitalising on your strengths is a clear way to improve your sustained career development.

We are continuing to see demand in the area of regulatory affairs as companies prepare their organisations to deal with the rigours of new and emerging legislation and the perceived tightening of regulations by health authorities. Demand over recent years has created a distinct shortage of readily available regulatory professionals with the experience in managing regulatory development programmes, as well as maximising the product life-cycle opportunities across global markets.

Also, the expanding role of regulatory affairs in supporting the organisation has seen a growth in the number of people being recruited into areas like regulatory intelligence and policy, regulatory operations, early drug evaluation or due diligence. This variety has broadened the career opportunities for regulatory affairs professionals and has introduced new skills to the function.

This demand has encouraged a shift in the recruiting approach of many companies across the sector. To overcome the scarcity in regulatory affairs skills, companies have needed to be far more versatile and proactive in their approaches to recruiting these regulatory candidates. It means there is now a strong reliance on International recruiting strategies, trawling the diverse regulatory affairs talent pool of Europe and beyond, to attain the necessary regulatory skills to support projects. Companies have had to employ proactive strategies to reach the candidates and aggressively pursue them, offering different incentives to be able to attract the very best. And while we have seen some easing in the market, the dearth of regulatory affairs talent seems set to continue.

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