Jessica Zabloski, Research Associate at Bioo Scientific Corp., describes making ELISA kits in the Jobs sections of Biotech-Careers.org website.

Biotech-Careers.org gives students details about real work environments, realistic estimates of paychecks, and accurate information about the academic paths to careers in a variety of biotechnology fields.

These three categories are among the among the information gaps Bio-Link purposefully addresses with Biotech-Careers.org (http://biotech-careers.org).

"We realized that there weren't career sites out there that met this need, so we built our own," said Sandra Porter who developed the website with Linnea Fletcher. Both Porter and Fletcher are co-principal investigators of the Bio-Link Next Generation National ATE Center for Biotechnology and Live Sciences based at City College of San Francisco.

Porter, a microbiologist and author of Bio-Link's blog, made the job information searchable by salary, geographic location, and the level of education required (high school, associate's degree, bachelors degree). Fletcher, a professor and chair of the Biotechnology Department at Austin Community College, identified the types of career information needed, gathered much of it, and entered it on the website.

The website is featured in the October issue of ASBMB Today. The article notes the "Bio-Link website shows students that the scientific enterprise has the room—and the need—for workers of all sorts."

Since it was launched in June 2012, the Biotech-Careers website has built its average audience to 6,000 page views per month. Porter says many of the site's users are high school teachers and college instructors who incorporate information the careers information into their courses.

One high school instructor, Julie Reis of Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco, has even contributed the activity she uses with her class to the website for other educators to use.

The website has:

• Articles on job search techniques, resume writing, and tips for using the website.
• Learn the Lingo quizzes that help students learn biotech acronyms.
• A careers section that describes various biotech jobs. Each job has its own page with salary information, links to other jobs in related areas, links to similar jobs, links to photo diaries, and videos from people working in the field.
• Education links to certificate and degree program offered by colleges affiliated with Bio-Link. These links take users to the map page on the Bio-Link.org website to quickly relay information about the location of programs nationwide.
• Job search links to pre-constructed job searches at different sites. When a user clicks one of the links, he or she sees job postings by location in real time.
• State-by-state lists of biotech employers.
• Job area pages describe general areas related to biotechnology such as aquaculture and biomaterials. Each job page describes a career field and links to career descriptions, photo journals, and videos.
• Video interviews of Bio-Link graduates about their careers and photos of them on them at work.
• Biotech-related videos.