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INDIANAPOLIS — A new partnership with the University of Indianapolis is creating a custom talent pipeline of biomedical equipment technicians for Roche Diagnostics through the newly-created Roche Academy.
The curriculum is using real-world training and customized coursework to create industry ready grads for high demand jobs at the Indianapolis company.
Victor Inglima is heading into his senior year at UIndy. As a chemistry major, Inglima is setting up his career path early with Roche Diagnostics.
"Eventually I would like to go to med school," Inglima said. "However, I see this as a really good gateway for me to get a lot of experience, do good for a company and increase my value and all that."
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UIndy biology and chemistry students who are eligible can join the newly created Roche Academy.
For the first cohort of the academy, eight UIndy students are participating.
Students will complete a Roche-customized curriculum path and summer internship experience focused on the hands-on, life science and engineering skills necessary for employment at Roche.
"We work in the health care industry, we are in the diagnostics business in particular on the side of the support organization and we go out and take care of our customers equipment, in the laboratory, in hospitals in doctors clinics and those types of things all around the United States," Russ Fellow, the Project Lead of Roche Academy, said. "And so these individuals that are going through the Roche Academy, we need people who are out there."
Roche Diagnostics partnered with UIndy to create the next generation of their workforce. With a large portion of their current staff heading into retirement, Roche needed to create a strategy to recruit new talent for their team.
LEARN MORE | Roche Academy at the University of Indianapolis
Juniors interested in the program will interview with Roche and then begin to take electives Roche has specified as part of their initial training. Then, those students will participate in a paid internship with Roche the summer leading into their senior year.
"As long as that works out, they like Roche and everything going along well, then we will put a job offer in front of them at the beginning of senior year and they will be able to make that decision and if they chose yes this is the right job that they want to partake in, they continue their senior year with the electives and then upon graduation they have a job lined up, they know where they are going to work and they are going to come work at Roche," Fellows said.
Fellows says this job is a great way to start working for a company that has the ability for a lot of career growth.
"From there that opens up an opportunity to a lot of other jobs at Roche certainly, and they can move into other field jobs, other jobs that are based out of the Indianapolis campus and they can take on a technical job with leadership, there is a lot of different opportunities that this opens up the door for," Fellows said.
Roche Academy requirements are nothing outside of the standard requirements to obtain a biology or chemistry degree at UIndy.
"The nice thing is that the space we are operating within on the degree is actually a standard degree, we are not asking them to take anything unique that would make them should they decide to take a different path," Fellows said. "There is nothing unique about the degree in biology or chemistry that is going to disclose them from anything that they would want to use that for."
It is an opportunity for students like Inglima, from Brownsburg, to kick off their career early and prepare to become a successful member of Indiana's workforce.
"I am looking forward to making a lot of relationships with people, just working as a team and having some goals set forth by a group of people and accomplish those tasks you know, every day come in to work and doing what we got to do to make it happen every single day," Inglima said. "I am ready to learn a whole bunch because I know, I think I know about Roche but there is so much more for me to learn, and I am really looking forward to all the knowledge there is with all that."
