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Brookings: Accelerating equitable growth in North Carolina’s life sciences clusterBrookings:
Published May 22, 2024
The one-minute version of this case study
- North Carolina’s life sciences cluster is booming. Over the past four decades, North Carolina—anchored by the Raleigh-Durham region—has grown a world-beating cluster of life sciences research and manufacturing. Between 2020 and 2022, life sciences companies committed to invest $9.1 billion and create 12,500 new jobs across the state, including jobs in biopharmaceutical manufacturing that do not require a four-year degree.
- North Carolina’s core challenge—and opportunity—is matching talent to these jobs. Currently, life sciences companies are struggling to identify and recruit the workforce necessary to meet this demand. As a result, the industry is poaching talent from each other or recruiting workers from outside of the state to fill job openings. Meanwhile, thousands of North Carolinians could benefit from these jobs but are unaware that they exist or do not have a way to access training programs.
- The Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBBRC) is helping North Carolina invest in a more diverse talent pipeline. The Accelerate NC – Life Sciences Manufacturing coalition’s $25 million BBBRC strategy is the story of a region trying to avoid the highly unequal outcomes present in most of America’s major technology hubs by investing in a more robust homegrown biotech talent pipeline and ensuring that underserved and historically excluded communities have awareness of and access to these opportunities.
- For an innovation cluster to evolve toward equity, it requires much more than job training. This case study explores the design and implementation of Accelerate NC’s wide-ranging life sciences talent development strategy, including the expansion of entry-level biopharmaceutical trainings in partnership with community colleges and minority-serving institutions; the creation of ambassadors and other inclusive outreach initiatives; and strategic employer engagement across the sector. It offers lessons on how workforce partners can use creative and tailored outreach, awareness-building, and industry engagement strategies to form a more equitable innovation cluster.
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