The following is an excerpt from a Boston Business Journal originally published on August 27, 2024:
Since 2017, Massachusetts has seen an increase of more than 4,000 employees each year — including a jump of over 22,000 employees from 2020 to 2021.
But for MassBio, the continued employment growth in 2023 is a positive sign nonetheless for the resiliency of Massachusetts’ biotech ecosystem.
“With all of this, and everything we’ve heard about company layoffs and closings, the fact that we gained net new employees in Massachusetts in 2023 should be thought of as a win,” Ben Bradford, head of external affairs at MassBio, told the Business Journal.
Among early-stage companies, Bradford said a lack of venture funding is causing biotechs to be more cautious about hiring.
“As companies are not bringing in as much money from the venture community, they’re probably not hiring quite as much as well,” Bradford said.
The biomanufacturing sector saw a loss of just over 2% of the workforce in 2023, according to the report.
“While it went down a couple percent, it only went down about 200 people in total in 2023. So I would attribute that to just general business cycles,” Bradford said. “But I do have great faith and belief that our heavy pipeline in advanced therapies will give Massachusetts an opportunity to continue to grow its biomanufacturing workforce, because those are therapies where the research and development being in close proximity to the manufacturing, at least at an early stage, is beneficial.”
Meanwhile, Massachusetts’ R&D workforce grew 3.67% in 2023 compared to 2022. Nationally, the biotech R&D workforce decreased by 0.5%. MassBio found that Massachusetts had just 900 fewer R&D jobs than California last year.