Career opportunities for a pharmacist

For them, it is crucial not only to carry out its core responsibilities at the pharmacy, but also add some creative touch, gain credibility of the pharmacy through personal characteristics and inform the visitors about important information on medicinal products through consultations.

However, under the current conditions, this important social component of a job is often lost, as with the intense work at the pharmacies nowadays (12-hour working day, high flow capacities, open form of sales) providing pharmaceutical consultation is quite problematic. Modern technologies come into play here, which are increasingly used at the pharmacies today, namely, electronic portals with information programs, online resources at the pharmacy, electronic catalogs, which can be utilized by every visitor.

Medical representative: sales person or medical specialist?

The job of a medical representative in the present conditions can also be a classical solution for the graduate from the Faculty of Pharmacy. Over the last decades, this profession which was once considered exotic has become quite ordinary. In contrast to retail pharmacist job, medical representatives have far more opportunities to realize their aspirations to improve communication skills and increase knowledge in the field of medical marketing.

Quite a few career opportunities open in front of an ordinary medical representative (as they gain the experience) over time:

- through sales and management, the specialist can be promoted to regional manager whose responsibilities would now include controlling of sales and medical representatives where managerial and analytical skills are required; the next step of the ladder is Sales Director;

- in marketing, an interesting position would be product manager, which is a specialist responsible for representation of certain drug groups (of the same manufacturer) in the pharmaceutical market; followed by the position of Marketing Director respectively;

- scientific and analytical work is not less interesting which has much in common not only with scientific research, but also with medical science journalism; experts are engaged with scientific reviews and articles writing, participate in clinical trials and drug registration;

It should be noted that each of the branches of medical representative career requires additional education in the areas of management, economics, marketing, and in the latter case also requires experience in research work.

Returning to the question of qualification of a medical representative: the fact that the employee is required to have higher medical or pharmaceutical education is of no doubt. Questions of medical ethics must always be in the spotlight when the area of activities is related to health.