The positive impact individuals have in shaping Canada’s bio-economy is evident. BioTalent Canada is sharing their stories to help others realize the benefits of adopting IDEA into their workplace.
What’s the best way to bring new employees up to speed on a vast product portfolio or build a technically knowledgeable team of sales reps in a business undergoing double-digit growth? For Applied Biological Materials of Richmond, BC, the answers come from within. The company has tapped its senior managers to mentor new hires and enlisted its own scientists to head up customer-facing functions.
For Zymeworks, culture is key to innovation. With an HR strategy focused on diversity and rooted in the neuroscience of collaboration, the Vancouver-based pharmaceutical company is demonstrating how businesses can address important social issues in the workplace and generate innovative ideas at the same time.
For Vancouver-based start-up Variational AI, the future of drug discovery is most definitely digital. Its innovative machine-learning platform generates novel and optimized molecules — with the potential to eventually cut preclinical drug discovery times from years to months. The challenge lies in proving that potential to chemists, biologists and clinicians.
The time frame to train new recruits is short for agricultural contract research firm Ag-Quest Inc., with only one field season a year for recent hires to learn new skills, it can take years to develop into fully productive researchers. The company has responded by pairing summer students with senior staff who can bring them up to speed more quickly.
Diversity hiring is on a lot of people’s minds these days. More and more businesses recognize it’s the right thing to do and good for the bottom line. For companies aiming at international markets — such as Fredericton-based anessa — diverse staffing can also be a powerful market wedge.
Immune Biosolutions aims to be Canada’s next anchor company in life sciences — and knows it needs a strong corporate culture to reach that goal. Success hinges on marrying the knowledge and expertise of its senior researchers with the capacity of next-generation recruits to fuel growth at high speed.
Since Resilience acquired its facility in Mississauga last year, the company has been busy expanding production and attracting new customers, including the Government of Canada. But the expansion has highlighted the need for more right-skilled talent to complete the work, an issue affecting all of Canada’s bio-pharmaceutical industry.
University of Toronto student Melissa Renn took part in the Student Work Placement Program (SWPP) when she was looking for an internship to complete her Master’s in Engineering. She had her eyes set on the medical device industry and Picomole piqued her interest. Since joining Picomole, Melissa has been instrumental in the implementation of a quality management system that enabled the company to seek ISO 13485 certification and to implement effective design controls, greatly improving the quality of its product design.
When COVID-19 struck, Ensero Solutions was in the middle of a massive remediation project at the former Mount Nansen gold and silver mine in the Yukon. With budgets constrained and the company needing more capacity in the field, Chief People Officer Mitch Strom leapt at the chance to bring on two skilled young workers through the BioTalent Canada Science and Technology Internship Program – Green Jobs.
Of all the places Kristofer Fequet thought he might find a job after graduating from university, back home in Quebec’s remote Lower North Shore wasn’t one of them. But the push to build a local bio-economy combined with a Career Starter wage subsidy paved the way for him to put his degree to work right where he grew up — and to contribute to the revitalization of his home town.
