Careers in the pharmaceutical industry

I'm Andrew Croydon, Director of Education and Examination Policy and Partnerships at the ABPI. The pharmaceutical industry is groundbreaking in terms of developing and manufacturing medicines and vaccines. Everyone who works in the industry ultimately is doing so to benefit patients. It's vitally important that we consider the future talent pipeline. What are we doing to inspire the next generation of scientists? 

So we did a lot of work in terms of careers outreach and STEM education support to make sure that they are making informed career decisions. The actual fact yes we need the scientists to carry on the groundbreaking research. We are an innovation based industry and that will never change but there are job roles across many other functions as well which help the industry continue to work and move forward whether that's legal, whether that's IT, finance and HR and so forth.

The projects that we're running at the moment are to demystify these misconceptions. So for example, roots into the industry. Historically, traditional academic route has been really popular and the majority of people working industry would have come through that route. However, whilst that now remains really important in parallel, there is an equally important vocational route into industry. And so we have people taking the vocational route, taking apprenticeships and gaining their first step on the career ladder that way. We are fully aware that we require a diverse talent pipeline because diversity brings diversity of thought.

So from our perspective, our research has shown that we still need to do work in terms of demonstrating the breadth of individuals that we're looking to recruit into the industry and how valuable they are to the industry. It's a really good industry to get into if you think about the fact that no matter what your job role is, you can be having an impact and bettering the lives of billions of patients around the world.