![]() ![]() One of the biggest misconceptions I had was that I would turn up on day one and be put to work. Having to negotiate pay can be stressful, especially when you’re inexperienced - that’s when it’s good to go to a recruitment agency, so they can do that on your behalf.Ĭareers advice from scientists in industry How easy was it to adjust to your new career? That was probably the biggest culture shock. It’s the same with academia, I think - there are pay bands, and it’s all fairly transparent. In the UK National Health Service (NHS), you work really hard, but you don’t necessarily have to think about the minutiae of your career - you’re somewhat funnelled along. What was one of the hardest parts of the recruitment process? We align the advice we give so that it comes from a member of our team with a matching professional background - a doctor, an academic or a pharmacist. For example, PhD academics want to know about specific roles suited to their experience. We also get different questions from people with different backgrounds. Jonathan Bowen is the medical lead for haemato-oncology at Sanofi in Reading, UK. Other common questions are related to the application and selection process - people want to know how to excel at an interview, and what types of question are asked. It is: “How did you get into pharma?” I am happy to describe my journey, but it is much more practical to turn the question around and say, “Why do you want to join industry?” That will give someone much more insight into what it is they want from a career while highlighting what they don’t know. What is the most common question you are asked? Our information is largely centred on the UK pharmaceutical industry, but the more general advice is relevant to jobs in the United States, Europe and Australia. ![]() My co-founders - a PhD academic and a pharmacist - and I provide free advice and links to useful information, and we offer training courses and 1:1 coaching and mentoring. I produced some resources for people looking to switch careers, and to bridge the gap in experience that everyone has when getting their first job. Careers in the industry sound appealing, but it can be hard to find out more about what the job entails, or where to start. ![]() I thought up the website about two and a half years ago, when I realized that my experience of navigating the career transition was similar to what everyone else goes through. Before getting into pharma, they were also used to working very hard for comparatively low pay, and academics experience the same culture shock and guilt that medics do: they can feel that they’re turning their back on their career and the institutions that trained them. In my current team, are two academics who have PhDs - their experience is very different from mine, but there are a lot of parallels. How does your career experience compare with that of your colleagues who have come from academic research? In 2021, I joined Sanofi’s haemato-oncology team as a senior adviser, and a year later, I became the company’s medical lead for the United Kingdom and Ireland. In 2016, I got a job at a clinical research organization, managing trials for drug companies.Īfter that, I took my first role in industry: I worked in medical affairs at a leading pharmaceutical company, where I spent three years as a medical adviser in haemato-oncology. I have always enjoyed the challenge of learning something new, and you get that motivation in the pharmaceutical industry, because you’re always learning and applying your knowledge. But I didn’t want to leave medicine altogether because of the big commitment I’d already made. I loved my job as a doctor and treating patients, but I had never been one of those people who had wanted to be a doctor ever since they could remember. Soon after qualifying as a medical doctor in 2010, I started thinking about alternative careers - not because I wasn’t enjoying medicine, but because I was looking at everything that motivates me in and out of work, and I wondered whether something was missing. Here, he offers advice on making the change, culture shock and the tricky business of negotiating a pay rise. In 2020, he and a colleague founded, an online mentoring resource that helps scientists and clinicians to navigate moving from academia, medicine and health professions into pharma. Jonathan Bowen left clinical medicine in 2016 for a role in the pharmaceutical industry and is now drug company Sanofi’s medical lead for haemato-oncology, in Reading, UK. Moving from an academic lab to an industry one can be a culture shock. ![]()
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