Five alternative careers you can also have with a Pharmacy degree

[Farhana Haque]

You may think the career paths for a pharmacy graduate are limited. High street chemists, hospitals, and the industrial pharmacy sector are common destinations, but did you know this course gives you a lot of transferable skills, so there's a huge range of other sectors where pharmacy graduates are highly valued? Here are five careers you may never have thought about before:

Students in the lab

Finance

Pharmacy students need an excellent knowledge of mathematics and brilliant analytical skills to interpret complex data, making them perfect for a job in the financial sector. You'll be able to thrive in a high-pressure, intense industry where problem-solving, manipulating numbers and predicting the movements of the stock market are key to success.

Teaching

As you'll quickly learn during your studies, pharmacists need excellent communication skills. You'll be dealing with members of the public, offering advice on different drugs and medicines, and ensuring the right prescription goes to the right person. This ability to speak confidently, clearly and to make complex information easily understandable, means teaching is a good career path for pharmacy graduates. With the most up-to-date knowledge, good research skills and a passion for your subject area, developing the pharmacists of the future could be a very rewarding job.

Science writer/journalist

With a pharmacy degree, you'll learn a huge amount of specialist knowledge. You'll be aware of the latest drugs entering the market and you'll understand theories about drug production and development. This specialist knowledge makes you attractive to a range of media outlets. Using your excellent communication, analytical and evaluation skills, you'll be able to turn complex information about the biggest developments in health care into accurate, entertaining content that people want to read, watch or listen to. If you're really passionate about examining the latest issues in the health sector, why not start a blog? This'll give you experience in science writing and will be a fantastic piece to show employers.

Medical sales representative

This is a very diverse role. Using your excellent knowledge on drugs and their uses, you must be able to persuade health professionals to buy the medicines you're selling to them. You'll need to work independently, setting up meetings and finding contacts to sell to. You'll need to present your products to potentially large groups of people, using your excellent communication skills to really get your points across.

A pharmacy based degree and a business brain are essential to this job as you must be able to prove why your products are better than the competition, along with an excellent knowledge of the laws surrounding drug development.

Regulatory Affairs Officer

You'll use your knowledge of drug development, ethics and law to ensure new medicines coming onto the market are safe and effective. You'll be analyzing complex pieces of data and using this to write a clear argument on why certain medicines should be given a license. You'll need to keep up-to-date on the newest drug laws affecting the country you're working in, and you'll also need to advise on the marketing and promotional side, so graduates with the most current expertise are in demand.