Essential Skills to Succeed in the Pharma Industry

Ranking third worldwide, India is often hailed to as the “pharmacy of the world”. India generic drug market reaches as much as 200 countries, with over 40% saturation in the US market alone. With the ever booming industry, India offers expanding career opportunities for budding pharmacists. With a huge domestic base and an expanding export market, the Indian pharmaceutical industry is expected to grow into a US$ 65 Billion industry by 2024. With the basic goals of discover, develop, produce and market, India houses a large workforce of scientists, doctors, engineers, and pharmacists who make path breaking discovery every day. To enter into this promising field, one needs to pursue courses in pharmacy, the basic being a Diploma.

While any educational degree is important to learn the theoretical and application aspects of the subject, certain skills are equally important to be successful in this field. This field requires a lot of interaction with the public and healthcare personal and these skills will help any student successfully tackle the challenges of the field.

1. Communication/Interpersonal Skills:Effective communication skill is a pre-requisite for any successful career. This field involves a lot of interaction with people from multiple sectors; it becomes even more relevant here. Pharmacists are expected to be able to provide information in such a way that they understand well. They also should be able to communicate differently with different group of people. The way you talk to a physician should be different from how you talk to a patient. One also needs to maintain a certain amount of respect and empathy while talking to other in the field. They are expected to have patience, diplomacy and ability to ease others’ pain with their words. That itself is a huge responsibility.
2. Management Skills:A pharmacist in any sector need to have good managerial skills. Apart from being involved in healthcare, they are also required to assist an organization achieve its goals. As they are involved in a number of activities at a time, such as stocking, checking medicines, handling customers, patients, doctors and are expected to do all at once. This requires some amount of multitasking skills to be able to successfully perform so many big and small tasks.
3. Being Tech-Savvy: The world is becoming increasingly reliant on technology. It only makes sense that pharmacists are also expected to keep up with the trend. Now-a-days a lot of activities use gadgets to make life easier, like maintaining records, scanning products, billing, inventory etc. A pharmacist needs to be able to handle modern day tools to keep up with the technology driven industry.
4. Patient counselling: This is perhaps one of the most important skills that a pharmacistshould have. They need to take care that a patient is properly educated about a medicine. For instance, several drugs have known to interact with other drug and food items. It becomes the pharmacist’s responsibility to educate the patient about it so as to avoid any adverse reactions.
5. Learning Attitude:We often limit our learning to what we learn in the classrooms. That should not be the case with pharmacists. Whether they graduated from the best pharmacy college in Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi or any other major city in the country, one should have the zeal to learn even after they graduated and spent several years in the industry.

The pharmaceutical industry is expanding at warp speed in India; this attitude will help you stay relevant in the industry. The pharmacy of the world helps a lot of people by providing affordable and accessible medicines for life saving conditions. The amount of investment and infrastructural development happening in the country ultimately aims at bringing down the cost of healthcare in the country and in the world. Pharmacists play a crucial role in this setting. The role of a pharmacist is no longer limited to acquiring and dispensing medicines but they are an important cog in the machinery of healthcare sector.

Pharmacists also play a major role in patient empowerment and ensuring drugs are not misused by individuals. With low-cost yet skilled manpower, major global establishments are looking invest in India and make India’s role in the global pharmaceutical market more prominent. That being said, students interested in making a career in this field should consider developing specific skillset that would help them succeed in the industry. Being ethical, professional and knowledgeable are three cornerstones on which one should build their pharmaceutical career on.