boltKey Takeaways
- Build Deliberately: McErlane's turning point was advice to stop taking opportunities as they came and start designing a career on purpose, choosing roles for what they add, not what they offer.
- The T-Shaped Leader: Running a business takes deep expertise in one discipline plus enough breadth across the others to make joined-up decisions. Depth alone caps how far a technical leader can go.
- Hire Builders, Not Operators: His biggest hiring mistake was placing operators into roles that needed builders. The cost of that mismatch is measured in lost years, not lost quarters.
- Look Beyond the CV: Values-based decision making, judgement under ambiguity and change agility predict success in a CDMO far better than a credential list.
- The Talent Constraint Is People, Not Capital: Capacity can be bought, but the CDMO sector's real bottleneck is the depth of experienced large molecule manufacturing talent.
- AI as Augmentation: Catalent's QAI deviation tool shows AI removing friction rather than removing people and shifting what the industry needs to hire for.
Written by
Sam McElroy
Director of Metric Bio · Metric BIO
Sam is the Director of Metric Bio and leads the Metric Nottingham Life Sciences team across CDMO, CRO and Clinical Supply, as well as being an expert recruiter in the CDMO space across Commercial, Technical and Operational positions globally.
