NC High School Grads Land $50,000+ Salaries at Pharma Giants

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I'm Brian Gordon , tech reporter for The News & Observer , and this is Open Source, a weekly newsletter on business, labor and technology in North Carolina.

Two of Johnston County's biggest employers needed more workers.

The pharmaceutical giants Novo Nordisk and Grifols were expanding in the town of Clayton, a booming bedroom community southeast of Raleigh. The labor market was tight, with a high number of drug manufacturers entering the region.

So the two companies began looking for talent in a place where the prospective employees weren't yet old enough to work at their facilities.

"Probably about two and a half years ago, we met with Novo Nordisk and Grifols," said Vic McCormick, vice president of continuing education at Johnston Community College. "And they were like, ‘Hey, we really need to get into the high school.'"

Novo Nordisk and Grifols together paid for every Johnston County public high school to offer BioWork , a one-semester, hands-on course that yields students a manufacturing associate certificate. With this credential, seniors who are at least 18 can get hired upon graduation for entry-level positions at these companies.

The average salary for an entry-level process technician at Novo Nordisk in Clayton, according to Indeed, is around $52,000.

"I just had a student graduate from high school on the 23rd (of May) and he had a job interview last Tuesday," said Megan Hayes, a Johnston Community College biotechnology instructor. "And he got offered the position that was at Grifols. So he is actually starting off, and he's freshly out of high school."

Other employers search for talent, too. Rarely have a few months gone by in recent years that a major pharmaceutical manufacturer hasn't committed to hire hundreds of new workers around the greater Triangle or Eastern North Carolina.

In the Wake County town of Holly Springs alone, Roche , FujiFilm and Amgen promise to hire more than 2,000 people combined. CSL Seqirus is there, too. Novo Nordisk last year announced it will add 1,000 jobs to its longtime Clayton plant. Merck is in Wilson County, and Johnson & Johnson is joining . Pfizer is in Rocky Mount, Kyowa Kirin in Sanford .

More than a dozen community colleges teach BioWork, which the North Carolina Biotechnology Center designed in partnership with local pharma hirers. The course adjusts over time based on the feedback area biotech employers provide.

But only in the past few years has this course spread into high schools. Johnston was first in spring 2024. Wake County Public Schools now offers it, too, as does Wilson County. Durham Public Schools will offer its first BioWork course at Southern High School in the fall.

The motivation for companies is simple: a larger talent pipeline. For students, it's about getting a certification under their belts - one that applies toward an associate degree, too - within the more supportive structure of a K-12 system. Life can be pretty complicated in high school. It can become even more complex after - with bills, family and jobs diverting attention from secondary education.

"If we're able to push into high schools, then it limits that gap between when the students are in school and when they're starting to get career ready," said Laura Rowley, vice president of life science economic development at the NC Biotechnology Center.

Area educators say the early returns are promising.

Wolfspeed bankruptcy watch

No major developments this week, but the Durham semiconductor supplier Wolfspeed continues to hold out for a "comprehensive" solution to its substantial multi-year debt burden, rejecting restructuring deals that would specifically address its nearer-term 2026 debt.

The Wall Street Journal a few weeks back reported Wolfspeed is working towards a prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy deal, and the company in no way, shape or form has pushed back on this.

Wolfspeed has $1.3 billion in cash on hand, a sizable sum, but its debt tops $6 billion. Whether Wolfspeed has to file for bankruptcy is a contested topic - especially among shareholders and the junior debt holders who stand to lose equity. But the law gives businesses a lot of latitude on this decision. And more are pulling the Chapter 11 lever earlier, according to UNC law professor Kara Bruce .

"It's a very powerful tool, and it's one that I think companies are increasingly using and not waiting for because there are so many strategic advantages," she said.

Two more data centers for NC, including a mammoth one

It's been a busy few weeks for North Carolina data center projects. Raleigh got a new "edge" center. And this week, two big projects announced they'd come to the Tar Heel State. One is especially giant.

Amazon unveiled plans to invest $10 billion (!) in a new data center campus about halfway between Raleigh and Charlotte. The company says these centers will power AI and cloud computing with the promise of 500 jobs. This is part of Amazon's push to invest close to $100 billion (!!) in AI infrastructure this year.

And in Rockingham County, a company called WhiteFiber said it will convert a recently closed textile plant into a 200 megawatt data center.

"North Carolina's rising profile, it's rising pretty fast these days," Sam Taber, CEO of WhiteFiber's parent company Bit Digital , said in an interview Thursday. "In semiconductors and AI and biotech, it's creating a really fantastic synergy for (high-performance computing) and hyper scale computer use cases."

Clearing my cache

• Can artificial intelligence keep your grandma company? The growing Research Triangle Park startup CareYaya says that's what "Frank" is designed to do .
• Duke University , the Triangle's largest employer, will offer faculty voluntary buyouts ahead of likely staff layoffs as the elite Durham school feels the Trump administration funding crunch from multiple angles.
• Is North Carolina about to land a 10,000-jobs project? This enormous employment projection comes from JetZero , a California aviation startup that says Greensboro is among its top three finalists for the company's first factory. There are signs the Piedmont city is in pole position to win the project. There is also a long history of lofty job forecasts never coming through.
• The Trump administration has terminated a long-running HIV vaccine program led by Duke University researchers, a move the school said "represents an enormous setback." The government argued the program was duplicative. Did Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy's opposition to mRNA technologies play any role in the decision?
• Durham's longtime coworking space, American Underground , will expand its Bull City footprint by returning to the American Tobacco Campus.
• The advocacy group U.S. Right to Know has appealed to have the University of North Carolina release more documents regarding the research UNC-Chapel Hill scientist Ralph Baric conducted with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, arguing the information could reveal more about how the COVID-19 pandemic started. Baric has previously testified that a Chinese lab leak was possible, though a natural origin more likely.

National Tech Happenings

• Reddit has sued the AI startup Anthropic for using the platform's data to train its artificial intelligence models.
• President Trump's tariffs on steel went into effect this week, leaving at least one North Carolina business owner concerned, per NPR.
• The Federal Trade Commission is investigating advertising advocacy groups for possible antitrust violations, The New York Times reports. At issue is whether organizations like the left-leaning Media Matters should be able to organize advertising boycotts of platforms whose content they find objectionable.

Thanks for reading!