Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Residency, board certification, or medical license not required for these non-clinical jobs

The other night during our NonClinicalJobs conference call with Dr. Steven Peskin, someone asked whether board certification was a requirement for non-clinical jobs within the pharmaceutical industry. Depending on the type of job, board certification, residency, or medical licenses are not required.

In general, an active medical license will not be required for most jobs where you are directly employed by a pharmaceutical company.  Some physicians who work for a pharma company may choose to moonlight once/month, so you'll need a medical license if you plan to do that.

Residency and/or board certification (active or previous) may be required for certain positions that require you to oversee certain areas of specialization. Keep in mind that some cardiovascular clinical studies may get managed by an internist who works within a pharmaceutical company. Or, a clinical study involving orthopedic surgery may be managed by a pharmaceutical VP of Medical Affairs who is a general pediatrician. Therefore, if you're a generalist, you may have the opportunity to expand into specialty areas. If you're already a specialist, then you may not have an easy time expanding into other specialty areas that don't specifically overlap with your specialty (eg, if you're a psychiatrist, you probably won't oversee oncology studies).

Take a look at some of these jobs:
Remember that many of these pharmaceutical jobs are filled by professionals who have a PharmD or PhD. Therefore, residency training is often not a requirement for many positions in the pharmaceutical industry.


If you missed our "Let's Talk NonClinicalJobs" call about physician jobs in the pharmaceutical industry, you can access the recording to Part 1 here

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