Today’s interviewee has a PhD in Molecular Genetics and is now a Senior Health Economist at a major pharmaceutical company. We spoke to him about his career path and current role.

Tell us about your job.

I demonstrate the value of drugs we produce to the NHS. That involves assessing the clinical evidence, but also looking at things from an economic perspective. I work in respiratory medicine, so I deal with inhalers for asthma and COPD. If our inhaler keeps people out of hospital it has the potential to save the NHS money.

How did you move from a PhD to your current role?

I really enjoyed my PhD, but as I entered my final year I realised that my work wasn’t going to turn up anything particularly earth-shattering so there wasn’t much of a future in it. I also sensed that the academic environment could become quite cutthroat, and one of the reasons I’d originally entered academia was I thought it wouldn’t be very cutthroat, so I decided I should find something else to do.

I went to a careers fair and I came across a stand for a health economics market access consultancy. I didn’t really know what that was but it sounded interesting from the description, so I looked into it a bit and ended up getting a job with that consultancy.

Our clients were usually pharmaceutical companies, and the job involved reading a lot of clinical trial reports and summarising them, both in written summaries and using meta analysis. I was at the consultancy for four years before moving to my current employer – a pharmaceutical company.

What does an average working day look like?

I often have to meet with the rest of the brand team working on the drug – which will include a medical team, a marketing team, a patient advocacy team, myself, and occasionally some sales people – to discuss strategy. But I also get to do a lot of analysis and writing on my own, which I quite like. After my PhD it took me a while to get used to working with other people, and to build my confidence to speak up in meetings and deliver presentations, but over the years I’ve got much better at it.

How does your PhD help you in your job?

A PhD isn’t essential for my job (a lot of people will have an MSc in Health Economics), and for my previous consultancy role it was enough that I just had a life sciences undergraduate degree. But although I don’t use any of the detailed knowledge from my PhD, many of the skills I picked up have helped me to get jobs and progress in my career. Those skills include being able to use statistical methods, and scientific reading and writing.

What are the best things about your job?

One of the things that concerned me about my particular PhD is it felt quite distant from anything that helped someone with the diseases I was researching. Now that I’m working with medicines it’s easier to see how what I’m doing can help people. And although it wasn’t the case at first, now that I’ve progressed to a more senior role I have quite a lot of autonomy, so I plan my own projects.

What are the downsides?

I went the route of working for a consultancy before moving into a drugs company, and that’s the route that a lot for people will take now, as pharmaceutical companies often require previous experience. The way consultancies are set up is that they make more money the more work they give you. So the deal is that you’ll get lots of great training because you’ll have a variety of clients and projects, but it can be quite hard work on entry-level pay. The hours still weren’t the worst, maybe 9am to 7pm, and a bit of work on the weekends, but it was difficult to fit all of the work into regular 9 to 5 hours. The experience I gained in consultancy was invaluable though as it helped me get my current role. And apart from the occasional very busy period, the work-life balance is very good here.

What’s the progression like?

I would say that progression to the level I’m working at can probably happen at a lot of companies. But the next step will be to a management position, and because there are fewer management jobs, the opportunities to progress from this point will be dependent upon senior people leaving and vacancies coming up. So moving up a position may require moving companies.

What tips would you give researchers wanting to move into health economics?

If you have a life sciences PhD there are lots of market access consultancies that will be interested in you. To make yourself appealing in interviews make sure you’ve thoroughly researched the industry and the company, and can tell them why you want to enter the sector and what you’ll bring.

Here is the 2nd of our series of guest blogs by PhD holders who work at IMS Consulting Group. You will find more information about PhD life science careers and IMS Consulting Group in our  Careers in Clinical Research, Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals  Forum for PhD/research students which will be held on 28th February 2012. Go to the Forum page on the Graduate School website for more details about this event.

IMSCG’s business is management consulting to the life sciences sector. So it makes sense that the company has two main priorities when recruiting:  the competencies required to be a management consultant and a strong interest in, and perhaps some background knowledge of, the life sciences sector. PhDs, especially those from the natural sciences, are therefore an excellent group in which to find promising candidates with this combination of characteristics.

The tendency for natural sciences PhDs to be interested in the life sciences sector is not surprising (although the emotive and pervasive nature of healthcare in our lives also attracts many PhDs from other disciplines). But what about the management consulting competencies?

A major part of the core skills of a management consultant is bringing objectivity, structured thinking and analysis to a complex and unstructured question. Consultants are curious people who enjoy problem solving. PhDs similarly tend to be curious by nature, interested in solving problems and combining objectivity and analysis in one form or another to a specific issue.

My PhD has definitely been a helpful starting point for these core management consulting skills. It gave me experience looking at a large and complex overall question and coming up with a way of approaching that question in individual steps. It gave me experience thinking about how to organize and present complex data and how to communicate the outputs of my research. And during my PhD, I took ownership for the outcomes of my own work, giving me a good sense of accountability.

That isn’t to say that my academic-type problem solving and analytical skills were enough on their own for management consulting at IMSCG. The thinking in consulting is much more explicitly structured and analytical than in academia; I therefore had to sharpen up on these skills before the interviews. I also had to learn how to do it in a much faster-paced environment, more intensively within a team, and with much shorter time periods for producing and showing people outputs of the work.

As my PhD was in the life sciences it also helped with understanding the more technical side of the life sciences sector. But if you don’t faint at the sight of words like atorvastatin or bevacizumab, then you can also learn that on the job!

Joel Hooper, IMS Consulting

In the lead up to UCL’s Careers in Clinical Research, Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals Forum which will be held on 28th February 2012, here is the first in a series of guest blogs by PhD holders who work at IMS Consulting Group.

I spent just under five fun, happy and, I’d like to think, productive years at UCL working towards my PhD in Neuroscience.  The first of year my PhD was actually a rotation year where I undertook three 3-month projects in labs at UCL, Kings and Imperial, following which I was able to choose where I wanted to spend the next 3-4 years for my main PhD project.  My choice was UCL, for a number of reasons:

Firstly, the campus has a great location in the heart of the city and most importantly it accommodates the majority of UCL’s degree courses on one large and single site. This gives UCL that rare feeling of a real campus university within London and creates a sense of community that is perhaps more associated with universities outside of the capital. Another attraction of UCL is its diversity, both culturally and academically. One day you might find yourself sitting in the Print Room Café alongside a Pharmacology lecturer from St Albans and the next day you’ll be sharing a table with a Law PhD from Greece. During my time at UCL, which was spent mostly in various laboratories and science buildings around the campus, I connected with a number of intellectually curious and academically brilliant people from all over the world with the same ambition to strive for excellence and challenge themselves; this is what makes UCL one of the world’s leading universities, particularly in life sciences.

The things I appreciated the most about UCL are things that equally drew me to IMS Consulting Group: people are proud to work at IMSCG and there is a strong emphasis on teamwork and community. IMSCG has a non-hierarchical structure which means that everyone’s opinion counts. Furthermore, people of all nationalities join the firm from both science and non-science backgrounds but one thing that is certain is that, like at UCL, all are welcome and all are appreciated. This opportunity to network with and work alongside so many great thinkers is something I had wanted to maintain upon leaving academia and thankfully this has been the case at IMSCG.  Our people continually challenge each other to better ourselves, though never to a level that creates competitiveness amongst peers. Because of our intellectual approach to project work, IMSCG continues to be at the forefront of the healthcare industry and is able to make a real impact on issues that our clients face and that will shape the industry for years to come.

Richard D’Mello, IMS Consulting Group

Find out more about life science careers for PhDs and IMS Consulting Group at the Careers in Clinical Research, Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals Forum.
To register for this event see the  PhD Employer Forum – Careers in Clinical Research, Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals page on the Graduate School website.