A lot of the people who could fill your entry level seats have never heard the word biomanufacturing.
They work in commercial kitchens, warehouses, hospital labs and motor pools. Plenty of them already follow written procedures, wear protective gear and log what they did. Nobody has told them that a plant in Holly Springs or Clayton might train them.
The White House's June 2023 report on building the bioworkforce said employers "cite a lack of awareness of biotechnology and biomanufacturing careers as a barrier." It also noted that many jobs in the bioworkforce do not require a four year degree.
The numbers in North Carolina
In December 2023, NCBiotech and NCLifeSci reported that the state's biopharma manufacturers would need at least 8,000 new workers by the end of 2026. That deadline is about two months away.
The same report put average entry level pay at $51,142 and average turnover at 13.4 percent.
The plants keep coming. In January 2026, Genentech more than doubled its Holly Springs investment to about $2 billion, for a plant that will support more than 500 manufacturing jobs and run by 2029. Novo Nordisk's $4.1 billion Clayton expansion adds 1,000 jobs paying in the range of $65,000 to $70,000 a year, according to Business North Carolina.
They are all hiring from the same region. If every plant waits for applicants who have already worked in a suite, many of those seats stay empty.
Who already has the habits
Look at what the job asks for. Following a written procedure exactly, every time. Keeping something clean when you cannot see the dirt. Writing down what you did, when you did it, so someone else can check it. Staying careful near the end of a long shift.
Veterans do that. So do food plant workers, hospital and pharmacy techs, and cooks who work to a temperature log.
NCBiotech profiled one of them in 2021. Terra Trujillo served in the Air Force and the North Carolina National Guard, earned a BioWork certificate through a program for military members at Central Carolina Community College, and took a contract role at Pfizer in Sanford. She found the program while scrolling a Raleigh Reddit thread one evening.
For a lot of career changers, that is the recruiting channel. Luck.
The training already exists
Community colleges cover the basics. Wilson Community College's BioWork course runs 136 hours and covers current good manufacturing practices, aseptic processing, and fermentation and cell growth. The only stated requirement is a high school diploma or equivalent.
So the gap is not the course. It is that a career changer cannot picture the job, and a posting full of words like upstream, downstream and media prep does not help them.
What to show them
A real shift. Gowning in, checking equipment, filling out the batch record, walking the suite. Include the repetitive parts too. Better they see them now than on day one. More on why to show the real job before people apply.
Someone who made the same switch. A former cook or a veteran saying what carried over and what was hard. We saw what a past career adds on camera with The Flame Detector. Its founders were firefighters, and the founder interview works because it is a man who has pulled up to houses explaining what he wishes had been different when he got there.
Operators, not executives. We made two videos for Kingston Vybes, a Greensboro food business. The second put customers on camera, and it outperformed the first largely because of that. A candidate believes an operator the way a diner believes another diner.
The first months. Who trains them, how long until they gown in on their own, and what qualification is like.
Many short voices. Several short clips from several new hires give a career changer more people to recognize themselves in than one film from the plant manager. One visit goes further than people expect. For Quality Workx, a Burlington contractor, a single walkthrough of one finished house gave us twelve social videos.
What video will not do
A video will not teach anyone aseptic technique, and it cannot tell you who will tolerate a gown for a full shift. The course, the interview and the qualification do that.
What it can do is reach someone who has never heard of you, answer the questions they are too unsure to ask, and let the wrong people opt out before you spend a training seat on them. More on how we approach recruitment video.
The short version
- North Carolina's biopharma plants said they would need at least 8,000 new workers by the end of 2026.
- Career changers already have the habits. Many have never heard of the job.
- Courses like BioWork cover the basics. Your part is making the work visible.
- Show a real shift, someone who made the same switch, and the first months, in short clips from several people.
- Video gets the right people to apply. Training and qualification still decide who stays.