Wonder how to find nonclinical jobs in your specialty, or does it seem like there aren’t any opportunities available to doctors like you? Trust me, they do exist! Listen to hear simple but effective strategies to accelerate your career change.

In this episode of The Career Rx we’ll discuss:

  • Exactly where and how to look for nonclinical jobs
  • A few strategies you may not be using today
  • So you found a few job postings – now what? 

More than 700 of your peers attended my recent webinar Where and How to Look for Pharmaceutical Jobs for Physicians. We discussed more than ten highly practical and very actionable strategies, regardless of your clinical specialty. I’m sharing a portion of the webinar with you here on the podcast today! For the full webinar, see the link below.

In this Episode:

[5:00] Trash that is really treasure
[9:15] Professional societies and corporate relationships
[11:00] Opportunities you touch each day (literally)
[13:30] Finding companies that are actively hiring (not LinkedIn)
[15:15] First steps you should do before you find that dream job

Links and Resources:

Industry Insider – 12 hours of CME, learn exactly how to land a rewarding nonclinical career without a new degree, connections on the inside, prior experience, or a pay cut

There’s an ‘on-demand’ version of the webinar you can watch here: https://my.demio.com/ref/Qf8CM0NyQGLrQjjM

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TRANSCRIPT: Episode 117 – How to Find a Nonclinical Job in Your Specialty


Hey, y’all. Welcome back. You know, not too long ago, I did an episode that was all about listener questions that came in during a webinar that I recorded, that was about exactly how and where to find non clinical physician jobs in pharma and medical device in literally any specialty. And in that webinar, I gave 11 strategies.

There were a lot of questions that came in during the webinar that I wasn’t able to get to during the webinar, which is why I recently published the podcast episode answering some of those questions. So they have decided to publish a portion of the webinar itself here for you, my listeners, it’s not going to be the entire thing.

If you want to hear the entire thing, I’ve got a way for you in the show notes to come check it out. To hear an on demand version of it, you’ll have to suffer through me interacting with the audience, you know, I will, from time to time, be talking to folks who are putting in comments and questions and asking poll questions and things like that in the on demand webinar.

But I’m going to post just an excerpt of it here for you to kind of give you a taste of what the webinars like in case you want to come check it out for yourself.

And then you can feel confident, regardless of your specialty that there are many, many, many, many opportunities, lots of companies, lots of products, lots of ways in which you could work for a biotech pharma and medical device or health it some kind of company that is in the industry side, that your specialty, will be an advantage.

Now, I have to also jump in here with a caveat. As I’ve said many times, in my course, Industry Insider, you do not have to get a job that’s within the specialty that is your clinical focus. So you are a physician, and you have broad skills that are of great value, regardless of the specialty.

So I myself have worked within the pharmaceutical industry in a variety of therapeutic areas that are not my own. I’m an anesthesiologist by training. I have worked in disease areas where they were looking for pulmonologists for infectious disease doctors and women’s health. That’s not me.

But it didn’t stop me from getting those roles. That kind of thinking shouldn’t stop you either. But having said that, you may be very interested because that is your train specialty. And you may want to stay sort of within that focus, even as you take your medical contributions outside of the clinic or the operating room, and into sort of a bigger way to make a difference by bringing better tools, better diagnostics, better technology, better medicines, better devices, to physicians, ultimately, for the benefit of patients.

To do all of that you may want to do that within your specialty and in this webinar, teach exactly how to find them. In this podcast, I’ll give you a preview of a handful of those strategies. So forgive the fact that the audio is going to shift from this intro to that webinar and that it is not recorded really crisply for podcast type consumption. But you’ll get a flavor and then decide if you want to hear the whole thing. Come on over. I hope you enjoy it.

[Number 1] Let me start with don’t throw away the throwaway journals. So you may not have this one. This is my anaesthesiology news. Right? It’s like it’s almost a magazine. It’s like an oversized magazine. It comes out, I think, monthly and it comes to my house.

I believe it comes to my house because I am a physician registered in this state. I don’t know. But I do know that I can sign up for free online. I also know that when I look on the second page, the same publishing group has a similar type of mag for general surgery, for pain medicine, for infectious disease, and for gastroenterology.

So at the least there are those stroke specialties that have literally the exact same thing, only a different title. But whatever specialty you are in, I bet you get some kind of thing that you basically throw away. Maybe it’s sitting around in the doctor’s lounge somewhere. And you’ve never looked at it before. Look at it.

The reason you should look at it is because it is probably 50% ads, right? It’s like 50% ads. So ads come in a couple of ways. So one of them is right here in the middle. I don’t know how well y’all can see this, but it says “special report.”

And if I could pull this out for you, you’d see there’s all kinds of information on here about how this is a supplement. It’s supported by Huron therapeutics, and it’s about postoperative nausea and vomiting and how to prevent it with this medicine. then that has come out, I’m not endorsing any of these companies or this or these medicines, by the way.

So this, this thing tells me a couple of things right away. I mean, first of all, I have a company that I may or may not have ever heard of, and a medicine that I may or may not have ever heard of, and the faculty, so there’s three faculty who are authoring this, I don’t mean authoring an air quotes, I mean, three faculty who have partnered with this pharmaceutical company to make this special report for this magazine.

So in my spreadsheet, I’ve got a company, I have a medicine, and I’ve got three doctors, actually, sorry, two doctors and a PharmD, that I could reach out to, to begin to network to begin to talk to, “Hey, how did you get involved in consulting with or working with this therapeutic company?”

So that’s one way, and then the rest are just like the regular ads, right? Like, there’s only I don’t know, if you can see all this, there’s only about like, parts of articles. And the whole rest are these giant page beautiful ads.

And why are ads important, ads are important, because that means there’s new stuff going on. And when there’s new stuff going on, they spend money on advertising. And when there’s new stuff going on, they have teams who are employed to be working on it.

Now, eventually, a lot of medicines become generic, as you know. And when they do a bunch of different manufacturers who all manufacture generic medicines, work on that not doesn’t mean there aren’t physician jobs there to like there might be, but where there definitely are, are the companies that are working on new innovations in the therapeutic space today, and spending their advertising dollars to try to help people be aware of those things.

So get yourself your throwaway mags go through it, all of the different companies, some of which will be very familiar to you, some of which will not, and especially if they’re doing some kind of education that is, you know, co sponsored, and it’s written by a physician colleague and your group. That’s someone that if you don’t already know them, and I mean, you might know them actually.

And so maybe you just call them up. And if you don’t know them, then maybe you reach out to them. And you know, obviously, they’re busy. They may not write you back, I don’t know, but you can try it. And if they don’t write you back then on your spreadsheet, you just like, you know, three, three strikes, and that’s out, I tried.

You are very welcome. Someone has said, Great tip, I’m a genius. You’re a genius. I appreciate it. Thank you, I appreciate that. So do that with those. Okay. And also, importantly, and you can do this with other specialties too.

Because like I said, you don’t have to get a job in your specialty. But especially if you’re one of the people who’s saying, I never see anything in my specialty, there is stuff happening in your specialty. And there it is.

Because those types of magazines view you as their customer, like you’re their customer. And when you think about it, that means they need internal knowledge within their company, to help them serve their customers the best and so they need someone like you working inside with them. So that’s, that’s where you can look, you’ll find so much just right there.

[Number 2] Okay. Similarly, you want to look online, at your core and professional societies. So for example, I saw I’m an anesthesiologist, so we have the American Society of anesthesiology. I am sure that you have an equivalent, whatever is the B. If you are in Canada, I I think there’s probably a similar one.

Like if you’re in Germany, I mean, I don’t know. There’s probably professional societies, I would think, find out what they are now there’s going to be core one so I got the American Society of anesthesiology. I also have state one’s, right? So there’s the North Carolina Society of anesthesiology. There are also subspecialty ones so you may. I don’t know how many you have, but we have a lot.

There’s a Pediatric Society of anesthesiology Society of teaching pediatric anesthesiology. We have one that is focused on obstetric and Perinatal anesthesiology. There’s one focused on pain and regional blocks. There is one focus on, I believe, neuro anesthesiology.

I mean, there’s like five or six. And so if you took some time to think about, okay, what are all of my national and local professional societies in my specialty, and again, it could be in an adjacent specialty, just something that is related enough, you know, you could explore that too.

And when you make that long list in your spreadsheet, and then you go to their websites, and you see who’s sponsoring them, right. So when the AASA is doing some kind of educational activity that is sponsored by a pharmaceutical or medical device company.

Well, there there again, we have a really, really loud, very contemporaneous, like current signal. This company is doing active work in this space in your specialty.

[Number 3] This one is something a lot of people have not thought about. I did this as an experiment with a client maybe 18 months ago. And I was blown away because she came back with over 55, zero companies. So she took her cell phone, she took her phone, she went to work.

And every single thing that she saw, that had a brand name on it, basically, she just took a picture. So, you know, I’m an anesthesiologist, right? So she got into the operating room, and there’s a ton of equipment.

There’s a drug dispensing Pyxis, there is a ventilator, obviously, there are different kinds of monitors that are integrated with that ventilator, there are different kinds of disposable gizmos, right, yeah, blood pressure cuff, pulse oximeter, bis monitor, that’s a brand name, actually.

So different ones. All of these things, all made by all different 100 manufacturers, infusion pumps, you know, the stuff that keeps patients warm on the bed, I mean, like I could go on, and she could go on. So she’s taking pictures of all of the medicines and the manufacturers of those medicines. And again, the new ones, that’s exciting, because there’s something new and innovative going on there.

The old ones and the generic ones, there’s still stuff going on there, it’s sort of less active, maybe harder to get a job, they may have less, you know, fewer needs there. But nonetheless, she’s snapping pictures as she’s going through her day. And then she’s logging into the electronic health record.

And she is having to fill out, you know, various forms for approvals for this or that. And then there’s diagnostics, right. And so she’s got to send off various things, a lot of this is related to blood and bleeding. But, you know, there’s diagnostic point of care diagnostics going on, all of these companies need doctors, there’s a job on the other side of every single one of these.

[Number 4] The other thing that you can do is you can go to clinical trials.gov, I would love it, if you type into the chat, don’t leave me now I know you have like just a few minutes. If you’ve ever been to clinical trials.gov, you can just type yes or no.

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ is where pharmaceutical companies register their ongoing trials. So here you go. So under clinical trials.gov, you can search for diseases by disease name. So if you’re not sure what medicines, or what companies, maybe it’s a rare disease or something, right, but you could put in those rare diseases.

And out is going to spit on all of the trials that are underway. The reason that this is really helpful, too, is because when you have medicines that are in phase two, or phase three, especially beginning of phase three, this is when the teams are really building.

This is when the hiring is happening for these companies for these diseases for these trials and these therapeutic areas with these medicines, like, here’s, here’s a great way to just find out like what’s happening right now,

I want to just kind of wrap this up with something that I do think you really really need to know. I am super sincere in telling you guys this. Now you know where and how to find the job opportunities, I would be misleading you if I said, all you need to do is just know that and then send them your CV, that is going to be the rarity that works out.

This is absolutely my tough love alert, if you are applying, and you’re networking, but you’re not prepared to do it. Because you don’t have the right stuff. You’re going to get rapid rejection, you’re going to be frustrated, you’re going to want to give up, it’s going to not work out, I don’t want you to feel that way.

Okay, and at that point in the webinar, I’m starting to talk a little bit about the kinds of things that you need to be ready to, to say and to share when you do meet people. And you have the right networking conversations, or you see the right job openings, and you want to have a successful application.

And so that’s outside the scope of this podcast. It’s one of the some of the questions may be answered in the prior podcast, or answering questions from this webinar that you just listened to an excerpt of but we’re starting to talk in there a little bit about what it means to be able to talk you know, your, your professional narrative of why you’re interested in career transition, as well as an effective LinkedIn profile and resume and things like that, that are very, very important, especially for shortening the learning curve.

I mean, no doubt people get jobs in industry all the time. And very often, people get lucky which is fantastic. I love some good luck. Not everybody is fully prepared and has everything kind of all ducks in a row. before they begin their search, and you don’t need to necessarily either, but I will tell you that having a strong way, both written and verbal, to communicate the transferable skills and the things that you’ve done in the past that are of value to industry type jobs, and to be able to explain your own professional narrative about what you’ve done, what you have already accomplished, why you’re interested in accomplishing something new and why it ought to be with that company.

And that opportunity. These are really, really important elements. And I think very, very often, in my experience anyway, with, with my students, with my coaching clients, that that’s what it boils down to.

They’ve, they’ve applied to a lot of places. And they just didn’t have the right what I like to call professional assets. And by that, I mean like the LinkedIn profile, the resume, the interview, prep, and so forth. But in any case, don’t let that slow you down. You’ve got to know where to start first.

And so pop on over, check the show notes pop on over to listen to this webinar in full, I think you’ll really, really find it a value. Certainly there might be some things in the 11 or so strategies that I discussed in there that you have already thought about or maybe already tried.

Maybe there’s a new way you can try it a little bit differently or more strategically. And certainly there will be some that you have not tried.

So I hope this gives you a better way or a more thorough way of thinking about how to find non clinical jobs in your own specialty. Even though of course that’s not required, you can get industry jobs regardless of your specialty.

Thanks so much for joining me today. That’s it for now. Hope to see you on that webinar.

Before you go, please leave me a review on Apple Podcasts, share and subscribe to this podcast. Your support makes all the difference and it truly helps this information reach someone who may really need it. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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