Hospitals value employees with experiences. Nurse, housekeeping, food service, pharmacist are all treated fairly. We have 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years service award and official celebration for these valued employees. They get nice gift and dinner. Usually after 5 years, your benefits also grow significantly (PTO ratio, 401k matching, bonus......)
Experience are really valued because how long it take to train a fully functional labor. It take at about three years for a pharmacist to truly be self sufficient and recuperate the hiring cost.
In terms of layoffs in hospital. Member with less seniority are more vulnerable regardless of their pay. We usually let go of the newest hire with severance package.
As with pay cut, it is difficult to enact that unless such measure is hospital wide. Even wage stagnation for pharmacy department is hard to orchestrate, because HR can’t single out a department. Unless hospital is in dire situation, they usually steer away from negative publicity.
Amid pharmacy saturation, our VP has recently obtained 10% pay scale increase for our department from HR. Our top pay for staff pharmacist is at $70 with max of 7 weeks PTO. Our system is in second tier metropolitan with decent cost of living.
The claim that retail pharmacists make more money was merely artificial and temporary at best about 10 years ago. Pay trend has now been restored based on knowledge, skillset, expertise and most importantly the replaceable value. Hospital pharmacists are now pulling ahead (I remember 10 years ago, hospital recruiter told me that only 1 new grad in 10 goes to hospital and they lose existing people to retail.) Hospital pharmacist are hard to recruit and train, each hiring decision is made carefully. They are definitely not commodity.
Study hard, get good grade, network...... just like any other potential employees in any industry. Remember we are not entitled to a job(regardless the amount of tuition you pay)like all others, we have to compete.
I was a B student who miss more than 70% of my classes in pharmacy school. My preceptor told me I had no chance to make it. I am on my sixth job now and I have double my pay from 10 years ago into 200k. I guess seniority in my case was not really relevant.
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