My opinion is more negative. Like UF, many schools are starting distance campuses...and thus accepting more students. Also, someone told me that in a few years, doctors will be --not exactly fined, but something sort of like that--if they don't submit prescriptions electronically. This means they won't need pharm techs to enter the prescriptions and one would assume that there will be fewer mistakes for pharmacists to correct when proofreading prescriptions. Also, robots can fill presciptions as they do in some hospitals, this may be done at all pharmacies in the future.
Also, the UF class of 2009 was the first to have many students who couldn't get jobs in the geographic location where they wanted to (but they all did get jobs.) I think that although there are many cities in the country where pharmacists are in SUPER high demand (and will get super nice salaries accordingly,) Florida is getting quite saturated and I predict that salaries will go down. A few months ago, I checked out pharmacy jobs in Orlando. Most paid aobut $100,000 per year and the range was from $80,000-$120,000. So, to be VERY conservative, I figure that worst case scenario, I will be able to make at least $60,000 when I graduate to account for salaries dropping due to flooding the market with pharmacists.
Now, I sound pretty negative. Yes, I will admit that...but at least I know that I will not be dissapointed. Realisticly, I would think that salaries won't go down much if any...so I should be very pleasantly surprised to get around $100,000 per year. Regardless, I could be happy at $40,000 per year, so anything more is all gravy. I just hope there are enough jobs in the area since I really don't want to relocate.
The father of a friend of mine is a recently retired pharmacist. He now works part time from his home as a pharmacist. The pharm techs take a picture of the presciption or the bottle they got the pills from or what have you and he gets it on-line. Then he approves it and sends it back to them on-line. He doesn't make nearly as much as he did when he worked in a physical pharmacy. Obviously, with cost cutting being what it is, this may become more and more the norm. A huge benefit is being able to work from home.
Now, to put it in perspective, I am 43 years old and I used to LOVE computer programming in high school in the mid 1980's. I didn't go into it as a career because I figured that I wouldn't have a chance since I didn't start programming until high school and all the newborn children could start programming as a hobby in elementary school. By the time they graduated high school, they would have countless hours of programming experience as a hobby. (Instead, they have countless hours of playing video game experience and surfing the internet experience, closer to none of actually writing computer programs which is what I used to do outside of the classroom as a hobby.) Needless to say, Computer Programming has consistantly been a fantastic career and so, my predictions can be, shall we say, not the best.
