The field of pharmacy, like many other medical fields, has many specialities and lots of career paths. Some settle for a certain one and others tend to have the urge to try and discover multiple paths until they find the suitable one.
We sure won’t be able to cover all the pharmaceutical career paths out there in one article, but we will get you introduced to the most common ones.
Quality Assurance
Let’s start off with Quality Assurance which forms a crucial indispensable part of the pharmaceutical industry. If you work in quality assurance your main role is ensuring that drugs work safely. This is maintained through quality assurance tests that you are going to conduct as a professional. You test for the physical, chemical and therapeutic stability for drugs in different conditions to make sure they won’t show adverse impacts on patients. From the skills, you are going to need for such a field are good technical and numerical skills.
Pharmaceutical Sales & Marketing
Moving on to one of the most common career paths in the field of pharmacy: “Pharmaceutical Sales & Marketing”. With all these pharmaceutical companies and millions of drugs out there, sales and marketing is to take place for sure. It is the business of promoting pharmaceuticals both for the clinical aspects of the product as well as gaining market share. Such a career acquires various skills; such as being detail-oriented, having excellent planning and strategic thinking capabilities and having solid communication skills including presentation skills.
Community Pharmacy
Next? Let’s get to Community Pharmacy, the field that enables you to use your medical and pharmaceutical background to help hundreds of patients on a daily basis. Personally, I find it a superhero job. As a community pharmacist, you need to be an active listener and an excellent communicator to counsel patients effectively. Working as a community pharmacist requires some managerial skills as well. They used to tell us that a community pharmacist is just a businessman with a medical background.
Clinical Pharmacy
We can consider clinical pharmacy as a recent speciality in the field and it is emerging and getting more important each and every day with the crucial roles clinical pharmacists are taking. Clinical pharmacy is even getting more specialized and that is the awesome thing about science; the more we know, the more specialized we need to be.
If you are interested in clinical pharmacy and in travelling too, maybe you should think about studying for the American Board of Pharmacy Specialities. There are preparatory courses for various BPS specialities, for example, BPS Pediatrics, BPS Nutrition, BPS Oncology, BPS Cardiology, BPS Critical Care Pharmacy and much more.
We hope we have given you a good hint about some pharmaceutical career paths, especially if you are a pharmacist in your last two years at pharmacy school.
If you need help in deciding which of those career paths you should take, you can check this course out! How to Select Pharmaceutical Career.
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