It's a funny industry, there's a lot of things you can do, longevity and salary comes with higher education, but the more specialized you get, the smaller your choice of jobs/locations gets. I'm rocking a bachelor's in SF bay area, so there's plenty of options around and I'm not worried about employment, but I compete with people from ivy league backgrounds, so jobs in academic labs are harder to get, as they prefer to hire alumni. At this level though, experience is king, so make sure you're putting in hours at a lab if you aren't getting a master's or PhD. If you are, I'm probably preaching to the choir, but make sure whatever it is you are doing you really, really like doing it, cause you'll do it every day.
I'm coming at it from an interesting angle, since I'm a Chemical Engineering student and all my bio experience is from electives. I'm interested in process optimization and/or scale-up and/or really anything else I can get my hands on. Starting to inquire with various professors about working in their labs this upcoming year. As for experience, I already have completed 3 co-ops with 3 different companies. However, none of them have been in a Biotech field.
Yeah, totally different angle, I'm on the pure research end and it's sounds like you're more about engineering/systems management.