Every year we at Pharmaceutical Manufacturing conduct a Job Satisfaction and Salary Survey. This year marks our eighth year, and we would love your input if you’re employed in the pharma/biopharma industry. It’s important to note that this survey isn’t just about quantitative data.

If you haven’t been exposed to “xtranormal” yet, the video below is a good introduction. Xtranormal allows you to create virtual conversations between characters you create. Here, Mike is a chemist in his first day on the job at a major pharma company, while Heidi is charged with his orientation. As you’ll see, life in Big Pharma is not all that Mike had thought it would be.

We at Pharmaceutical Manufacturing are always speaking with industry experts and insiders, picking their brains about issues that truly matter to the industry. Below are 12 of my favorite interviews from last year—in case you missed them the first time around. Enjoy.

Opinions are like noses . . . everybody's got one. (That's the polite version of the maxim, of course.) Never has this been more true than about what to expect in pharma and the life sciences for 2012. We've been trolling the blogs and media outlets, and here is what 13 "experts" are saying about the coming year:

Last week, we unveiled our Ten Best Pharma Quotes of the Year. Here below is our special CEO Edition, with the ten best quips from, and about, drug company CEOs this year.

This year, we introduced our Pharma Replay newsletter, a monthly review of the best quips and quotes coming out of the drug industry. (Subscribe here.) Here’s a look back, in no particular order, at the best quotes of 2011. From these quotes, it appears it was a rough year for J&J, and for jobs.

In our last post (“Manufacturing and Millennials: Is Bad PR the Problem?”), manufacturing experts lamented the fact that today's young people, particularly in the U.S., just don’t see Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) careers as sexy enough.

It’s a maddening paradox that unemployment remains high in the U.S. and other countries, and yet manufacturers struggle to find the skilled workers they need. There’s a clear skills gap out there. Young people especially—“millennials”—aren’t gravitating towards manufacturing careers and don’t see the work as sexy or fulfilling.

What to do? Can manufacturing be made sexy for young people? For older workers as well? This was the subject of a panel discussion today at the annual Rockwell Automation Fair in Chicago.

Counterfeiting, says Johnson & Johnson’s Ron Guido, is a form of flattery. “If you don’t have counterfeits in your business, chances are you don’t have a good brand,” said Guido, J&J’s VP for global brand protection, speaking at the ISPE annual meeting in Dallas last week. In other words, a successful product/brand (Gucci, let's say) is the apple of a counterfeiter's eye.

As one might expect, single-use bioprocessing equipment was in the spotlight at Bioprocess International's annual meeting in Long Beach, California, last week.  Vendors introduced new or improved products.  However, there was also some candid discussion of the current drawbacks of existing technologies from those who use, and advocate use of, the systems.  Surprise!  Biodisposable equipment is subject to the same manufacturing-based variability that most products are prone to.  Only now, people are studying more closely the potential impacts that this variability can have on cell cultu