Why I Recommend Larger Pharma Companies for Your First Career Role in Pharma/Biotech
When I’m working with a client, I typically steer the person towards a medium/larger pharma/biotech company that is “public” (meaning publicly traded) and has marketed (“approved”) products. What’s the definition of “medium/larger”? Well, at least in the thousands.
To give you a few examples for context, according to Statista, Pfizer is reported to have ~78,000 employees whereas Biogen has ~7,000 employees per their LinkedIn.
These are companies that likely have global presence with offices in both United States and ex-U.S.
Here are a few of the reasons I recommend these companies over smaller companies for your first role in pharma/biotech:
- Frankly, better chance at landing a role – these companies have many layers of employees and more bandwidth to train physicians that are new to the industry.
- Resources – these companies have all the functional areas “in-house” and you will be surrounded by people that will introduce you to the inner workings of these functions (i.e., biostatistics, regulatory, health economics/outcomes, market access, clinical pharmacology, compliance, etc).
- Stability – multiple therapeutic areas and multiple products provide stability for these companies as compared to a younger, smaller company that may be reliant on one product (and the product might not even be approved yet). Of course, developing drug therapies is a risky business in general – more compounds fail than make it to approval – but a larger company has “more shots on goal” typically.
There are certainly times when a smaller company can be a great fit but if you have to sort through all the companies and job postings, for efficiency I recommend starting big!
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