Solving a Vocational / Academic Problem

He was gathering wood, chopping it and selling it to feed his family of four. After seeing an advertisement for a biotechnology training program at Ventura College, he attended night classes for two years while still struggling to make ends meet. Before he graduated from the program, he was hired as a lab technician at a large biotechnology company. Now the company is paying for him to earn a bachelor’s degree.

She wanted to enter the science work force after being married and raising kids. Although she had a bachelor’s degree, she wanted current skills for work at a bio-manufacturing facility. She found this training at Moorpark College and now works at a company in Thousand Oaks.

Similar stories could be told about students graduating from biotechnology programs at other community colleges throughout the state. With California having more than half the biotechnology employees and more than one-third of all biotech companies in the United States, our community colleges are uniquely positioned to support a niche of training.

Biotechnology industry workers must be something of a hybrid. Their training cannot be strictly vocational because laboratory research work or even manufacturing the products of that research both require an understanding of basic sciences, such as biology.

Their training cannot be strictly academic either, because they need hands-on skills to work in the lab or to produce products for sale, which is the purpose of the company. The closest term I can use to describe these people is “scholar / practitioners”--scholarly in their knowledge of biology, physics and math but utterly practical in applying that knowledge to, say, fixing the flow rates in the fermenter producing Factor 8 for hemophiliacs or insulin for diabetics.

There is a myth in the biotech industry that students trained at community colleges are somehow “less” than those trained elsewhere. Yet when these students are hired as interns or temporary employees, the myth explodes.

Now that the human genome has been mapped, new categories of scholar / practitioners are emerging in the fields of bioinformatics (the melding of biology and computer science), genomics (the field using the huge amount of data in the genome, the complete genetic makeup of an organism) and proteomics (the linear sequencing of information from molecules of proteins). These arenas require both academic understanding and pragmatic skill.

What has any of this to do with California community colleges?

The biotechnology industry is maturing from research to production and requires many more people in processing, quality assurance, manufacturing, quality control and similar positions. The need for people on the manufacturing side will be accelerated by bioinformatics as the mysteries of the human genome are unfolded.

These breakthroughs have created a market for computer whizzes who have fundamental knowledge of biology. California community colleges are uniquely positioned to provide these people.

About 50% to 70% of students enrolled in scholar / practitioner courses at the community college level already have a bachelor’s degree, or higher. Many have realized that although they are fully equipped with academic knowledge, they do not have the hands-on training needed for employment. Others come to community college with academic training in a related area, such as medicine, but seek retraining for a new occupation, or they are upgrading skills to qualify for other positions where they work. This training is not limited to an associate of arts degree, typically the terminal degree at the community college level.

Of the 25% to 50% of students enrolled in biotech programs who do not hold a higher degree, employability is high in the lab assistant, quality-control and manufacturing arenas. Taught by some of the best faculty in the world, these programs are accessible at community colleges. They are inexpensive and they are geared to working professionals, with many courses offered in the evenings.

Community college faculty in biotechnology programs are dedicated to students. They put in extra hours tutoring or writing grant proposals to assist in building biotechnology programs.

The biotechnology training programs in the California community colleges are an overlooked source of excellence in training and in employability.