Largely agree with a lot of what this guy says -- he says get any experience (preferably something tangentially related to what you want to do) and then spin it during an interview.
I'll tell you that I'll hire someone who has hustled in the last year after graduating (even if its not in the perfect post-grad job) and has a good story to tell over the crybabies on this forum who didn't work a day in their life throughout 4+4 years of school and then stayed unemployed for a year after getting their license ..
Interviewer: What did you do in the last year?
- Customer service job: This was a humbling experience. I built up my customer service skills and was able to defuse stressful situations during an unprecedented pandemic. Because I come from a healthcare background, I stepped up and took a leadership role in terms of the public health aspect of opening up my store and made sure we were compliant with local, state, and national guidelines. This was viewed as a best practice and all the stores in my region adopted the guidelines that I put in place. I learned how to deal with stressful interactions with customers, a fast-paced and ever-changing environment, and how to meet and exceed goals placed by management despite an imperfect situation
- Unemployed grad 1-year after licensure who has done nothing: bUT dA SAtURAtION
Edit: Sure there are a lot of bad actors in the pharmacy saturation, but
blaming others is not going to help your personal situation
I think it's relevant to consider the fact that you've mentioned before that you don't work in a traditional pharmacy setting, which leads to the question - even though you personally say that you'd prefer to hire a pharmacy school graduate who spent a year working in a non-pharmacy job post-graduation (e.g., customer service, fast food, bank, etc.), do you have any evidence at all to suggest that the people in charge of hiring pharmacists to work in traditional pharmacy settings (I.e., retail pharmacy chain DMs and hospital pharmacy directors) would share the same sentiment?
In other words, with the established minimum requirements for both retail (intern or pharmacist work experience in a chain retail setting) and hospital (PGY-1 completion or several years of experience) pharmacy jobs having become so stringent AND unwavering in recent years, why should anyone adopt the mindset that 6-12 months of generic customer service experience will make them competitive for a pharmacist job without any proof to back up this assertion? Aside from you and the podcast host, have you actually heard a chain retail DM or hospital DOP say that they'd hire a new grad with totally unrelated experience?
If you're going to call out we "crybabies" for remarking on the fact that a vast majority of us are not able to get jobs in light of the impossible-to-meet minimum job eligibility standards that the job market saturation has given employers the leverage to establish, then you could at least provide some fact-based reasoning for your assertion.
Otherwise, to make an analogy, it's kind of like me telling a hobbyist runner who wants to improve their running speeds that the reason they're not making progress towards achieving that goal is because they're not taking a specific dietary supplement... and yet at the same time, I'm not able to reference any clinical trials or studies of any nature to provide any sort of physiological basis for my assertion that use of the supplement may result in improved running speeds. (And to take it a step further, when they refuse to take the supplement because they don't know if it's safe OR effective, I shame them by accusing them of not being willing to do what it takes to improve.)
