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Winning the Tech Talent War: Life Sciences vs. Big Tech Giants
By: Sebastian Cornacchioli
High turnover of tech talent isn’t just a staffing challenge. It’s a warning sign that companies need to rethink how they attract and retain tech professionals. With intensifying competition for tech talent, ignoring this issue can undermine a company’s innovation and growth.
This blog article explores the challenges within the life sciences industry, the pros and cons of various hiring options, and effective strategies to reduce the 20.6% life sciences talent turnover rate.1
Why This Matters for the Life Sciences Industry
The consequences of tech talent shortages are profound. Without a pipeline of skilled workers and effective retention strategies, life sciences organizations may struggle to keep pace with technological advancements and meet the growing demand for innovative healthcare solutions.
The life sciences industry is experiencing a 35% shortfall in the required talent, according to CSG Talent.2 This shortage is expected to worsen, impacting day-to-day operations and the industry’s ability to innovate and stay competitive. Key tech roles, such as software engineers, data scientists, and cloud engineers, are essential for developing cutting-edge solutions in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices.2
Furthermore, Labiotech reports the skills gap is widening, based on an increasing number of unfilled positions for high-skilled tech workers in the life sciences sector. The competition for these professionals is intense. Tech workers have the flexibility to move between industries, making it even more challenging for life sciences companies to attract and retain the necessary talent.
According to Deloitte Insights, it is especially important for the life sciences sector to attract and retain tech professionals due to its reliance on advanced technologies for research, development, and patient care.
Hiring and Retention Issues Are Not Going Away
Demand for tech talent is growing, and the supply cannot keep pace. In the U.S., the conditions are ripe for the desired talent to seek better opportunities more frequently, higher salaries, more challenging projects, improved work environments, and have significant bargaining power in the job market. Companies must adapt their hiring and retention strategies to remain competitive and attract and keep the best talent.
The retention problem is severe. As an example, Zippia reports nearly half (45%) of software developers remain in their positions for only 1 to 2 years.3 More than two-thirds (69%) of software developers stay with their employers for less than 24 months.3 Other key software talent have similarly high turnover rates.
According to the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the need for software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers is projected to grow 25 percent from 2022 to 2032.4 This demand across all industries leaves life science organizations to compete for talent with all sectors and tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Apple.
Three factors are impeding the growth of tech talent in the United States:
- The pace of technological advances exceeds the existing workforce’s abilities.
- The educational system in the U.S. does not match the tech talent needs.
- The pace of reskilling and upskilling programs is too slow to pick up the slack.
Considering these drivers, the tech talent gap will remain problematic without substantial shifts in educational methods, corporate training, and recruitment strategies.
What can companies control right now?
Corporate training, recruitment methods, and retention strategies.
Factors Impacting Your Tech Talent Development Strategy
Every organization makes choices about how to invest in and manage their tech talent development. The choices fall broadly into three categories and often include a blend of the following:
- Build in-house expertise and capacity through hiring, upskilling, and reskilling.
- Outsource heavy workloads.
- Create partnerships to supplement in-house expertise and manage external software development.
Unlike tech firms where software is the primary product, life science companies often develop software as an enhancement to their main product (e.g., machinery, chemicals, vaccines, drugs, diagnostics, instruments, equipment, or reactive agents). This introduces unique challenges and considerations for staffing strategies.
When the primary product is a tangible innovation, how does that impact the staffing strategy for secondary software enhancements? Should the company build the in-house software expertise independently, build expertise with the help of an expert partner, or outsource it?
Several additional factors shape how a life sciences organization develops and expands its capacity to support its software objectives effectively:
Software Complexity: The intricacy of the required software can influence whether a company develops it in-house, outsources it, or establishes a partnership model to help build the expertise.
Company Maturity: When making staffing decisions, the needs of a start-up differ significantly from those of an established organization.
Staffing Strategy: The decision to hire permanent employees or contractors can impact company culture, compliance risk, access to specialized talent, costs, and scaling speed. Every organization must choose a strategy based on its needs. Spelling out the software roadmap and recognizing the gaps is a good place to start.
Financial Resources: The availability of funding plays a critical role in determining the scale and speed of capacity development.
Innovation Requirements: Is innovation critical to your software enhancement? If so, choose a talent source known for innovation.
Specialized Tech Talent Matters for Life Science
Tech talent for life science companies requires specialized skills. They must excel not only technically but also have industry-specific expertise. When creating a life sciences team, three critical areas must be covered:
Domain Knowledge
Life sciences teams benefit when tech professionals understand the domain, such as biological concepts, medical research, healthcare practices, and the specific regulatory landscape. Domain knowledge improves the accuracy of requirements gathering and creating code and documentation that stakeholders can understand.
Regulatory Compliance
The FDA’s approval process validates the quality, efficacy, and safety of regulated medical products, which increasingly rely on complex software. Tech professionals in the life sciences need a thorough understanding of regulatory frameworks to ensure patient safety and data protection, compliance with regulations, and avoid costly fees and delays to market.
Security Measures
Security is a critical concern, as medical devices often handle sensitive health data, making them prime targets for cyber threats. Life science tech talent needs proficiency in the latest cybersecurity practices and an understanding of the severe consequences of data breaches, including data loss and impacts on patient health and trust. Every line of code and data point must uphold the highest safety, privacy, and care standards.
5 Tech Talent Hiring Options: Weighing the Pros and Cons
Finding the right approach to tech talent hiring can be challenging, especially for life science companies that need specialized skills. It’s common for organizations to use a blend of hiring options. This section explores five distinct hiring strategies, examining their benefits and challenges to help organizations make informed decisions about building and managing their tech talent.
1. In-house Hiring
Recruitment for in-house hiring is often seen as the best long-term strategy for talent acquisition. It offers autonomy, control, and a deep understanding of company culture and values. But building an in-house team comes with its own set of challenges.
Longer hiring cycles are a barrier. Getting approval to increase internal headcount can be a roadblock, often eliminating in-house hiring as an option for near-term needs. Some life science companies report up to a two-year approval window for hiring in-house.
Internal hiring comes with higher costs, a lag time before new talent becomes productive, a general shortage of qualified talent, and high competition for domestic talent.
2. Staffing Agencies
Staffing agencies offer immediate relief. They can provide skilled talent available on short notice. This approach may seem less costly. After all, the talent you need right now may be available within days, and the costs are limited to the length of the contract. Or are they?
The hidden costs and long-term downsides of staffing agencies aren’t immediately obvious. The use of contractors can erode team dynamics, leading to a suboptimal experience for the contractor and eventual turnover.
Staffing agency hires fail more often than not–not because of the contractors but because of the lack of support and team dynamics. Due to time and location constraints, contractors are often not fully integrated into a team. Usually, other team members don’t even know the contractors’ names. Furthermore, contractors get limited training and attention, and they’re typically not given meaningful work.
After you rush to hire and onboard them, you often end up right back where you started with an empty seat because of turnover. The cost of turnover is more than just the cost of replacement when you consider the training time, lost knowledge, and disruption to the team.
Despite the downsides, staffing agencies may be a part of your ultimate strategy. If so, they should be used for less critical roles. A solid long-term strategy avoids the urgent hiring of your critical staff.
3. Outsourcing
Outsourcing can help manage development workloads, allowing core capabilities to remain in-house and enabling the business to move swiftly. However, it often results in the highest attrition rates among hiring options, as outsourced teams may feel treated differently than direct employees.
For life science companies, outsourcing introduces significant security risks, including the potential for intellectual property theft, data breaches exposing sensitive patient information, and challenges in maintaining compliance with global regulatory standards. Additionally, there are risks of supply chain disruptions and difficulties in ensuring quality control over outsourced processes.
Therefore, it is crucial that much of the critical talent comes from within the organization or is highly integrated into it to maintain high standards and protect sensitive information.
4. Offshore Talent
Offshore talent is a solution that casts the widest net, tapping into a global market. It can bring diverse expertise and typically the lowest hourly cost.
However, this geographical divide often comes with challenges: communication hurdles, time zone differences, cultural differences, and transportation time and costs. These factors can hinder the sense of belonging and long-term commitment critical in the life sciences industry. Additionally, the downsides of outsourcing mentioned in the previous section still apply. Security concerns include risks of intellectual property theft, data breaches, challenges in ensuring compliance, and potential supply chain disruptions.
It’s easy to be attracted by a low hourly rate. However, the lowest hourly rate of development is not the ultimate goal. Outsourced talent pricing may look like a bargain on paper, but don’t ignore the hidden long-term costs, such as delays to market or reduced revenue from the loss of first-to-market advantage. Short-term savings from outsourcing do not compensate for these potential losses.
5. Nearshore Talent
Hiring nearshore talent offers an enticing compromise: reduced or eliminated time zone differences, better cultural alignment than offshore, and impressive cost benefits. Nearshoring is a progressive step towards a more balanced workforce. However, traditional nearshoring can also have some downsides associated with outsourcing if nearshore talent is merely used as labor rather than fully integrated into your organization.
The Promise of Latin American Talent
Since 2013, the Mexican government has invested in free STEM education initiatives. As a result, approximately 20% of Mexico’s university graduates (or about 110,000 students) earn an engineering degree each year. For context, U.S. universities awarded 192,474 engineering degrees in 2022. With its highly skilled workforce, Mexico has emerged as a prime destination for nearshore tech talent for companies of all sizes, including U.S.-based companies like Medtronic and IBM.
Latin America offers a highly skilled workforce that is geographically close and culturally aligned with the U.S., enabling smoother collaboration and real-time communication, which are critical in the fast-paced tech environment.
Additionally, Latin American talent provides significant cost savings compared to domestic hiring, making it a financially attractive option for companies looking to optimize their budgets. Latin America’s growing tech education programs and vibrant tech ecosystems ensure a steady pipeline of talented professionals ready to meet industry demands.
But the question remains: How do you engage and retain tech talent for the long-term? That requires an innovative approach like the BOT Partnership Model, a proven approach. What is it?
An Innovative Approach to Nearsourcing: The BOT Partnership Model
To overcome the traditional downsides of outsourcing and nearsourcing, the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) partnership model presents a novel solution. With this model, a partner builds a dedicated nearshore team and site for the client, operates the team and site to meet specific business goals, and eventually transfers complete control of the team and site to the client (if desired). This approach provides several advantages to traditional nearshoring:
- Control and Integration: The BOT model allows for greater control over the team, ensuring they are fully integrated into the company’s culture and processes.
- Security and Compliance: With closer oversight, companies can maintain higher security and compliance standards.
- Long-Term Value: The people resources, knowledge, and nearshore site developed for the client are preserved at the end of the engagement. When the client transitions the nearshore team to its ownership, the knowledge and expertise remain within the organization, offering long-term value beyond typical outsourcing arrangements.
Integrating Latin American talent through the BOT model addresses the unique challenges life science companies face, providing a scalable and efficient solution for building and retaining a specialized workforce.
7 Proven Strategies for Reducing Tech Talent Turnover
According to Aon, the turnover rate for all talent in the life sciences sector is around 20.6%1. It’s likely a higher number if you breakout tech talent only.
Aon defines the life sciences industry as companies involved in the research, development, and manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, biotechnology-based products, medical devices, and other products aimed at improving the lives of organisms. Roles included in the Aon survey are: research scientists, laboratory technicians, quality assurance specialists, regulatory affairs experts, and sales professionals.
This section outlines seven strategies ITJ has proven to increase tech talent retention and minimize turnover impacts. It provides actionable insights to help companies build resilient teams and maintain a competitive edge. ITJ maintains a life sciences tech talent turnover rate ranging between 12 to 16% by implementing these seven strategies.
1. Create Multi-level Teams
Attrition is inevitable. However, its impact on productivity is significantly reduced in multi-level teams compared to flat team structures. Multi-level teams allow for career pathing and backfilling positions in the event of turnover and keep team members motivated by providing a clear path for growth.
A multi-level structure also ensures the retention of expertise within the team if someone leaves. If a higher-level team member leaves, a junior team member can be prepared to advance into the role. Subsequently, when filling a lower-level position, the new person benefits from management and team support from above, enabling them to become productive quickly.
2. Build Self-contained Teams
A high-performance team comprises five to nine cross-functional people. Instead of
hiring individuals to work on a small part of a complex project, build a team customized
for the project’s goals. A typical self-contained software development team has:
This allows the team to be accountable and self-sufficient. Working as a team is more engaging than working on an individual project, improves the quality of complex projects, and
boosts morale.
3. Foster a Culture of Accountability
Accountability keeps employees engaged. Communicate goals and measurable metrics for each team and individual to provide clear expectations for how each person contributes to a project. Encourage ownership of tasks and projects, ensuring everyone is accountable for their work and contributions.
4. Support and Train
This helps develop talent within the organization and fosters a sense of loyalty and engagement among employees, leading to higher retention rates. Give employees growth opportunities and a clear picture of the skill requirements and progression timing for advancement. Most employees leave for a better chance to build skills and career growth. Provide better chances by understanding each employee’s career goals and mapping out a plan that helps them achieve their goals. Whether a broader role, a higher role, a different role, or more pay, be clear about how employees can achieve their goals without leaving.
5. Regularly Assess and Develop Skills
Conduct thorough evaluations of employees’ skill levels and identify the growth needed to align with business objectives and personal career aspirations. Provide detailed and constructive feedback quarterly to keep employees engaged, motivated, and on a clear path toward development. This ongoing assessment helps ensure the company’s needs and employees’ professional goals are effectively met.
6. Recognize and Celebrate Contributions
Offer feedback and recognition for contributions. Specific, timely, and detailed feedback tells employees their efforts are appreciated. It boosts their motivation and enhances job satisfaction. Publicly acknowledging contributions can also foster a positive and supportive work culture.
7. Align Tasks with Individual Talents
Engage employees by matching tasks with their unique skills and passions. Assign work that aligns with an employee’s strengths and interests to increase job satisfaction, foster creativity, and enhance productivity. This also helps employees feel valued and motivated, reducing the likelihood of turnover.
Increasing Retention: A Key to Winning the Tech Talent War
One key to building a robust tech team in the life sciences is conquering retention issues. This will require a strategic blend of in-house expertise and partnerships to help find, develop, manage, and retain talent. While each approach has pros and cons, the ultimate goal is to foster a high-performance team that can navigate the industry’s unique demands, including regulatory compliance, cybersecurity, and patient safety.
Organizations can significantly reduce turnover and enhance productivity by applying proven strategies, such as building multi-level and self-contained teams, communicating accountability, providing ongoing support and training, and recognizing employee contributions.
Understanding employees’ specific skills and interests and aligning them with project goals ensures a motivated workforce dedicated to advancing the mission of life sciences companies. Through careful planning and a balanced approach to talent acquisition, life science organizations can build capacity that meets and exceeds industry standards, enabling innovation and growth.
Schedule a free consultation with our team and let’s make things happen!
About the Author
Sebastian Cornacchioli is a Director of Engineering at ITJ. He has over 20 years of experience in software development, maintenance, IT infrastructure, and project/program management. Sebastian has led software development in the LATAM region, utilizing nearshore, onshore, and offshore models. His work spans multiple sectors, including healthcare, biotech, energy, and insurance, which enables him to assist clients in planning software development centers in Mexico.
As an Agile consultant, Sebastian is well-versed in SCRUM, SAFE, Kanban, XP, and other Agile frameworks. He has guided many businesses in transitioning from traditional to Agile models and has extensive experience transitioning critical businesses to different models and technologies. Sebastian has also assisted top-tier companies in their CMMI 2.0 evaluation process, focusing on improving their maturity level to 4 and 5. Sebastian can be reached at sebastian.cornacchioli@itj.com.
About ITJ
Need a long-term solution for building tech talent capacity in the life sciences industry? ITJ is here to help. We specialize in building and operating teams of highly skilled tech professionals from Latin America who are experts in the life sciences. Our professionals are culturally and time-zone aligned with your organization and ready to tackle your specific needs.
With our Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model, we manage the entire process—from building and operating your team and nearshore site to transferring ownership when you are ready. This ensures you receive a dedicated Software Center of Excellence and a custom team prepared to work in just one month. This approach allows you to deliver software products to market faster at significant cost savings while building in-house capacity for the long term.
Reference
1. FinancesOnline. (2023). Employee turnover statistics. Retrieved from https://financesonline.com/employee-turnover-statistics/
2. CSG Talent. (2024). Recruitment challenges facing life sciences industry execs in 2025. Retrieved from https://www.csgtalent.com/insights/blog/recruitment-challenges-facing-life-sciences-industry-execs-in-2025/
3. Updated on September 9th, 2022, Zippia analyzed 102,987 software developer resumes to determine the average turnover rate. Retrieved from https://www.zippia.com/software-engineer-jobs/demographics/
4. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2022). Occupational Outlook Handbook: Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers. Retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm