How to get a job in Pharmaceuticals

Do you have innate talent and fancy working in multidisciplinary teams at the frontiers of medical research?

Drugs are big business. In the pharmaceuticals industry, those with a scientific background will find an array of opportunities. These range from working in basic discovery labs on chemistry, biology, molecular biology or drug metabolism through to clinical management jobs, pharmaceutical development and information technology. There are added bonuses of excellent opportunities for career development and good working environments.

Employers look for PhD graduates in chemistry, biochemistry, molecular science, pharmacology, pharmacy, computing science, statistics, mathematics and biology. They are especially keen on those with several years' postdoctoral experience.

Several major pharmaceuticals companies such as Zeneca and Pfizer are on big recruitment drives. Zeneca has just announced that it will create 200 jobs by 2000, largely in research and development of new drugs. Pfizer is expanding its United Kingdom staff base by 500. Pfizer is trying to fill several hundred research posts by next year. A PhD graduate can expect a starting salary of about Pounds 24,600.

Gill Samuels has worked at Pfizer for 21 years. With a PhD in pharmacology, she was one of the firm's pre-clinical research directors before becoming director of science policy. One of her research groups contributed significantly to the production of Viagra. Of work in the industry, she says: "The final product is really interesting. You can be working right at the cutting edge of science, with great new equipment, with collaborators across the world, and your final product will be of benefit."

Working in industry does not appeal to every soon-to-be ex-academic, but it is worth considering. The pharmaceuticals industry is renowned for nurturing staff talent. "If you have talent, Pfizer will find it and encourage you to develop it," Dr Samuels says. "I regard Pfizer as a great big mentoring organisation. Once it recruits people, it has a real investment in them. You get to know more about yourself and what you can do."

Quite often, Pfizer takes people into the basic discovery labs for a couple of years and then lets them diversify. Dr Samuels explains: "They apply their scientific training, but not necessarily their discipline - going into regulatory affairs, clinical management or IT. Regulatory affairs are the folk who deal with all the clinical data and interface with regulatory authorities to get a compound registered. This is a key part of any pharmaceuticals company because they are dealing with huge amounts of data."

When Pfizer looks at PhD graduates in drug discovery, it is first and foremost looking for scientific ability and those who are able to build on it. Even with a PhD it can take five to ten years to become a real drug discoverer. "You look for people with innate talent and the ability to work in teams - that's very important because we use a lot of multidisciplinary teams here, across groups, across departments and across the world."

These basics are really all Pfizer seeks. All the other necessary skills are provided with in-house training and by encouraging staff to attend general scientific meetings. "We put them in positions (in which) they can learn," says Dr Samuels. "So they might be a member of more than one discovery team, they get a breadth of internal training, and they might not be involved just in a discovery team dedicated to a particular new medicine target, but might be looking at a specific process and this might be transatlantically. You get to multitask, it's great fun."