Prime Therapeutics adding 300 jobs in Eagan
Prime Therapeutics, an Eagan-based company that manages pharmacy benefits for health insurers, plans to hire 300 additional workers.
The company says the jobs are information technology and business analyst positions that pay an average annual salary of about $80,000.
"We thought we would be better off going to a place where we have had a history of attracting very high quality people," said Eric Elliott, CEO of Prime Therapeutics.
Prime Therapeutics is owned by several Blue Cross Blue Shield organizations and serves nearly 19 million consumers.
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The company has about 1,100 employees in Minnesota and 2,100 nationwide.
To make room for the employees, Prime Therapeutics will lease the nearly 100,000 square-foot former Eagan headquarters of the Buffets, Inc. restaurant chain.
Eagan's workforce fell from a peak of about 52,000 in 2007 to about 49,000 last year. And the city is on track to lose well over 1,000 jobs with recent and planned cuts at Delta and Mesaba airlines and Lockheed Martin.
But the city has been adding jobs, too.
City Administrator Tom Hedges said Eagan has about 20 percent more workers than it had a decade ago.
A lot of the job growth in the community has come from small companies adding 20 to 40 jobs, as well as large companies such as Thomson Reuters, Ecolab and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.
"Job growth and job stability has actually been very strong," said Hedges. "If you look at the ten-year growth, we have a pretty positive percentage."