The pharmaceutical industry and the research councils have provided very clear signals that there is a significant skills shortage in bioinformatics and that this shortage should be addressed as a matter of high priority. As a response to this the UK academic community has worked hard to provide a wide variety of bioinformatics training in a range of institutes and at a range of levels. Specific details of all the Master's courses on offer within the UK are available at the CCP11 website . The number of postgraduate-trained bioinformatics students is therefore beginning to rise steeply. The experience we have had at the University of Manchester is that the situation for good postgraduate-trained bioinformatics students is very healthy.
Companies are keen to take students for placements as part of their training.
This is to the point at which we have more offers for placements than we have students to take them. As well as those in the UK and Europe, a number of companies in the USA are now offering placements. The job market is also strong. The majority of our students go directly into bioinformatics posts in industry, the rest going predominantly to PhD positions. This shortage has had a number of important knock-on effects.