Taken from a thread in the Pharmacy forum:
What do you recommend I do if I want a job like yours? Or what do you recommend that I do if I want an entry level job that eventually leads to your job! lol....
First, do you even want a job like mine? It is certainly not for everyone. It takes a certain personality... so you need to have great communication skills - be able to talk to anybody (quite literally) and be able to make people listen to you even if they don't want to, and be a bearer of bad news, and be very convincing. And you need to be very analytical - thinking quickly, deciding what's important and what's not, and then digging really deep into what's important. You need excellent time management skills because you are constantly pulled in a million different directions. You need to be extremely independent. You need to be able to wear a lot of different hats. You need to be very curious. You need to be able to take risks.
It is not an entry level position, so you would need to do something else first. Options include doing a targeted fellowship in business intelligence/strategic planning/market analytics, or getting a job. Positions most helpful would be marketing or new business development or medical affairs. The catch? They are also not entry level jobs. Some of them do offer relevant fellowships, though. Otherwise, it's just taking whatever job you can within industry (usually medical information for pharmacists) and trying to get to work with intelligence people as closely as possible so when and if they happen to have an opening, you can come to them and say, "You know what I can do! And I really want to work with you guys!"
To start, while you are in school... try to get exposure to the industry, through an internship or a rotation, to see if the environment is right for you - and because that will make getting a fellowship easier. Try to develop the skills I talked about - student organizations usually help. An MBA may help, but I am personally not a fan of dual degrees because an MBA is worth so much more if you do a top program once you actually have relevant work experience... Start reading about pharmaceutical industry issues and thinking about them, so when you come to an interview, you can hold an intelligent conversation. Go to the Midyear and apply for a fellowship.
Basically, ideal career path would be:
- get relevant fellowship position
- complete the fellowship successfully enough to impress company into hiring you - since getting an intelligence job after just a fellowhip is tough, or find another company willing to take a chance on you
- after a couple years, you become a rare and valued professional and you can track the opportunity that looks particularly interesting and take it.
It's the first two steps which are tough ones.
What is the name of the company you work for?
Now, that's getting way too personal.
My first two positions were in a big pharmaceutical company, my current one is at a small company.
Also is your job available everywhere in the united states? or is it just certain states? if so where?
Limited to the states that have pharma and biotech companies' headquarters. Essentially, that's New Jersey, New York, Massachussetts and California. There are exceptions, of course, but the bulk are in those areas.
Thanks for the job description! So I guess the most stressful part is getting all your anaylsis and data correct right? I mean if you make a wrong anaylsis your company can lose a ton of money right?
I would say taht the most stressful part is when you can't get the corporate suite to buy into your analysis because their minds were made up long before you even started doing it. Which is exactly why it is so important to choose the right company to work at.
The other sources of stress could be tight deadlines - when someone comes to you for something they needed yesterday, and totally breaks your plans for the day, so you fall behind and/or stay working into the wee hours of the night. A way to avoid this particular thing is to anticipate what people need. It's a skill that comes with experience and experience only. I am still getting there, and probably will spend the rest of my working life getting there, but I had a great mentor, so I know it CAN be done.
As far as making mistakes... as my teachers told me, a valid forecast is not the one which is right, it is the one which is made using the best possible information with the proper care. No one can predict exactly what's going to happen, because world is not rational, decision-makers are not always rational, and random things just aren't predictable. Besides, it is never a one-person decision. There is a lot of discussion and a lot of input from a lot of people. That will mitigate for any one person's downfalls... and that way no one gets blamed if things do go wrong.
Tight budgets can also be frustrating at times... but if you can't be creative with resources you have, you are in the wrong line of work anyway.
Also, if you don't mind posting this, what were the job titles or descriptions of the three jobs you've held in that field?
That's getting personal again.
The only thing I would be worry about is making the wrong anaylsis OR if there are just too much to read. I am a slow reader! lol....
Being a slow reader certainly would be an impediment. Lacking confidence would be a greater one. But for you the biggest downfall would be your inability to separate what's important and worth spending time on from what's not important. This is the most fundamental part of the job.
Oh and what are all the companies that offer positions like yours? if you don't mind sharing.
Every big pharmaceutical company has intelligence function, and most small companies above a certain size. Besides, similar postions - in new business development, in strategic planning - exist in just about every company. But there are always very few positions like that in any company. Unless we are talking Pfizer/JNJ/Merck type behemoths, it's going to be a one or two-person show.