From Landmen to Lab Techs: how cross-training professionals builds companies

Oklahoma’s state motto is “Labor Omnia Vincit.”

Labor conquers all things. Or in other words, innovation overcomes obstacles.

Oklahoma is made up of millions of hardworking people. From blue color to white color workers, our state takes pride in our work, our legacy, and our innovative nature. And when times get hard, Oklahomans always come up with new ways to persevere and continue to grow, against any odds.

2020 was a year full of adversity. It was adversity the world felt, and all were affected. In Oklahoma, not only was the state dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, but it was also dealing with a struggling energy economy. Oil & gas was down, and people were out of work. But despite that, new companies were still forming, and new jobs were being created, fueling one of our ever-growing workforces – the biotech industry.

Greater OKC Chamber member Wheeler Bio, initially co-founded as Wheeler Labs by Jesse McCool, was named after the first oil well drilled in the Drumright-Cushing Oil Field in 1912, Wheeler No. 1. The company started in Oklahoma City as a COVID-19 testing lab after tech transferring an entire lab platform from a New York City-based lab. After a quick buildout of a lab, manufacturing and supply chain, Wheeler Bio created an at-home saliva PCR test. Their time was short, and OKC’s needs (along with the rest of the world’s needs) were high.

Wheeler Bio didn’t have much time to recruit an entire team of qualified people to fill out their lab, but they did have a lot of resources. The company’s primary investor, Echo Energy, was an oil and gas company, and Echo had an established network of oil and gas workers who had been recently laid off from the energy industry. What Wheeler Bio did next was extremely innovative; they cross-trained professionals to meet the world’s needs.

“What it came down to was that cross-training professionals in our network was faster than waiting for the “right candidates” to come through,” McCool said. “Our goal was to hire six former oil & gas professionals who had good experience and a good work ethic to work in our labs.”

After a month’s time of training, landmen and geologists had become medical lab technicians. Seven former energy sector professionals had now been trained across 45 different SOPs to become lab techs, session-ers and biotech customer support experts.

“It felt good to have the chance to put people back to work,” McCool said. “It felt good to not only be addressing needs we saw in our own city, but also the needs we saw the world have facing COVID-19.”

The re-training of professionals in cross-industry collaboration efforts is unique to markets like Oklahoma City. According to McCool, cross-training professional doesn’t happen as much in other biotech markets with high concentrations of companies in small geographical spaces, like Boston.

“Other markets have an excess of professionally-qualified employees,” McCool said. “Pharmaceutical and biotech companies alike don’t generally have to go outside of their domain to recruit. Those cities will have 200 applicants for a single job opening, and 95% of those applicants are extremely qualified.”

However, for Oklahoma City to compete with these markets, we have to once again embrace innovation to overcome obstacles.

“Cities like Oklahoma City need to adopt a new approach to recruiting,” McCool says. Instead of recruiting professionals who are qualified for a job, we need to look at recruiting professionals who are suitable for a job. These are two different approaches entirely.”

“It’s recruiting with the knowledge that there isn’t a critical mass of people available with the exact work training history that may be required. Instead, it’s recruiting while assessing transferable skills. With a heavier emphasis on learning abilities and strong training programs, we can build our base workforce in manufacturing from the local talent pool that’s already here.”

Oklahoma City is built for innovation. The re-training of oil & gas engineers for the biotech industry is a prime example of cross-industry collaboration and the efforts that will continue to put our state on the map. The assets and organizations available to student and professionals in Oklahoma do excellent work to arm future talent with the transferable skills and training needed to be better situated as candidates in multiple industries.

Cross-industry training is scalable and transferable to a plethora of industries. Oklahoma has the chance to be a leader in seeing this trend continue across the country as it becomes necessary for the American workforce. In simple terms, it seems to come down to being willing to train, being willing to learn and working hard, which once again leads us back to, “Labor Omnia Vincit.”

To learn more about Wheeler Bio, visit www.wheelerbio.com. 

Special thanks to Jesse McCool, Co-Founder & CEO of Wheeler Bio, for his time and help with this article.