Careers in Pharmacy

Pharmacy careers are part of the healthcare industry, an expanding job sector. An aging population and new developments in diagnosis and treatment (leading to increased use of medication) are the main factors leading this growth.

The pharmaceutical industry itself is a big part of this growth story. Along with coming out with a constant flow of new and exciting products and supplies, the sector has the ability to provides these new items to healthcare professionals with the use of the own organization of medical representatives.

One career in the pharmacy industry is this medical representative.

The Medical Representative

Showing doctors the newest in treatment helps the medical representative sell. An efficient and knowledgeable medical representative can build trust with doctor's as the rep will save many hours of the doctor's time. This is an essential task as new medications with greater effectiveness are constantly being developed.

The representative explains to the doctor how the medications work, and how they are an improvement over existing treatments. The representative receives intensive training that equips the person with product knowledge and sales skills. They also accompany experienced representatives to learn effective practices.

Once on their own, medical representatives must become efficient in their presentation skills as doctors generally have limited time for meetings..

Product Managers

A product manager is in charge of the marketing of a products and tracking the results of the campaigns. Product managers help prepare the sales presentations with clinical evidence and other persuasive information. They decide how the sales information will be produced and track the effect of the literature and the effectiveness of the campaign in general.

Sales Managers

Sales managers are usually former medical representatives and are in charge of a group of medical reps. Training and motivating the medical representatives is one of the main fuctions of a sales manager's job.

Regulatory Affairs

Various regulations govern the pharmaceutical industry. Their sales campaigns need to be approved - from permission to sell a drug for a particular use to what they can include in their sales literature. There can be lots of red tape in obtaining the necessary approvals. Because of the importance of getting a drug to market quickly, obtaining the approvals has become a full time position requiring a person who is both detailed and well versed in legalese.

Other Pharmaceutical Jobs

The main focus of this article has been on the sales side of the pharmaceutical industry. Actually, pharmaceutical companies need pharmacists, clinical researchers, HR managers, and other technical and non-technical persons to run their operations.

Drug companies spend a large amount of money on research and development of new drugs. These drugs are required to passed several clinical trials before that can be approved by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA).

Pharmaceutical companies hire many non sales people to manage the operational side of the business. A position (sales and non sales) in the pharmaceutical industry can come with a good salary.