Your First Pharma Job

The hardest step to a successful career in clinical research is the first one. Getting your foot in the door takes patience, preparation, ingenuity and a toolkit of supporting materials and behaviors that will make you stand out above the competition.  A well-crafted resume can help you get your chance to shine.

There are a million guides out there that will give you good general advice on writing and formatting your resume, and (with one important exception) I’m not going to waste your time by duplicating that advice here. These tips are specific to the clinical field. If you’re applying for entry-level jobs in clinical research, the following suggestions may help your resume get noticed.

1. This is the one piece of ‘general’ advice that I’m going to repeat. Ironically, it’s the one thing that you shouldn’t need to be told: PROOFREAD YOUR RESUME. It’s shocking, but when I worked as a recruiter I would estimate that 60% or more of the resumes I reviewed every day contained at least one glaring error. Whether it’s a simple typo, a spelling mistake or poor grammar, errors in your resume make you look bad. If you were mid-career, and had experience that was in high demand, small errors wouldn’t matter so much. It’s a rare company that would turn down an experienced CRA over a typo.  But when you’re just starting out you can’t afford to come across as lazy, uncaring, or inattentive to detail.  So double- and triple-check your resume for errors.  Reading through the text backwords, word by word, is a good way to catch typographical and spelling mistakes. For grammar, enlist the help of friends, and ask them to read closely.  This is especially important if English is not your first language.
2. The guiding principle that you should keep in mind is that clinical research is patient-oriented, human research. As much as possible, your resume should be written to place your experience, skills and objectives into this context.
3. Most clinical research professionals have an educational background in the life sciences or health sciences, but simply listing your degree is not enough to put you ahead of the pack. Keeping the clinical context in mind, you should draw attention to any of your educational experiences that had specific relevance to human health and medicine.  For example, you might write:

   B.Sc. Biology, Central Anystate University.  2006.
   Relevant coursework: Human Biology, Infectious Diseases, Cancer Biology,
   Pathology, Epidemiology
   Cumulative GPA: 3.4

   Don’t make any specific mention of coursework that isn’t directly relevant to the clinical field, such as genetics, biochemistry, or zoology — the one exception might be statistics, or better yet biostatistics. Do include your GPA if you did well (3.0 or higher). If you’re still working on your studies, make a point of taking classes that are relevant to human health.

4. If you have completed, or are completing an advanced research degree, it’s still important to focus on the clinical. Non-clinical and pre-clinical experiments using in vitro systems and animal models is valuable, and there are skills that you can transfer, but clinical research is very different and you won’t do yourself any favours by thinking that you’ll shift easily from one to the other. Again, draw out the coursework and the aspects of your research that are relevant to clinical studies, and de-emphasize the rest.  If your thesis wasn’t about human health, don’t draw attention to it — leave the title off your resume. Likewise, a series of publications on genetic pathways is very impressive, but unless they are related to human disease you should save them for a different resume. If you’re still working on your studies, take elective classes that will boost your knowledge of human health and different therapeutic areas, and try to tweak the focus of your research and the titles of your publications to reflect their relevance to medicine.
5. The two most important characteristics of a clinical research professional are attention to detail and communications skills. Your resume should reflect that you have these qualities in abundance. Show, don’t tell — give examples from your experiences (previous jobs, projects, extracurricular activities) that demonstrate these qualities in action. Perhaps the best single thing that you can do to demonstrate a commitment to developing your communications skills is to enroll in Toastmasters or another public-speaking program.
6. Use extracurricular and volunteer activities to demonstrate your interest in the field of health care. My alma mater has undergraduate clubs (the Human Health & Disease Students’ Association and the Society for Public Health Outreach, for example) that would be relevant, and there are of course many health-related charitable foundations that are always grateful for dedicated volunteers. You could also volunteer in a hospital or clinic. If you’ve ever volunteered to be a research subject in a clinical trial, this can also show your awareness of what the job is about. For example:

   - Volunteered as a research subject in a Phase I bioequivalence trial
     conducted by Example Clinical Research.

7. Demonstrate your knowledge of the drug development and clinical trials process. This should be right up at the top of your resume in the ‘profile’ section so that a quick scan for keywords at least puts you in the ‘maybe’ pile right at the start. If you can afford to complete a formal certification program in ICH-GCP, list it among your certifications; if not, complete a self-study online  or by reading and make note of it on your resume. Don’t go overboard here; include a couple of good resources that you have studied carefully but not a comprehensive bibliography of everything you’ve ever read on the subject.
   For example:

   Self-Study
   - Good Practices in Clinical Research Web Course, Center for Experimental
     Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences
     and Technology: http://hstelearning.mit.edu/gcp/eng/home.html
   - Woodin, K. & Schneider, J. (2003).
     The CRA's Guide to Monitoring Clinical Research.
     Boston, MA.:Thomson Centerwatch.

8. Join a professional association such as the ACRP or SoCRA.
9. Travel — a lot of travel — is a fact of life for clinical research associates, so it can be good to show that you’re aware and willing to handle this job requirement on your resume. But don’t say you “love to travel” or you’ll come off as someone expecting their job to be an endless vacation.  Traveling to clinical sites isn’t at all glamorous. So instead, write something like:

   - Ready and willing to accomodate frequent local, domestic or
   international business travel.

None of the above will guarantee your success in finding an entry-level clinical research job. Your resume is only one part of a comprehensive job-search strategy, but optimizing it using the essential goals of clinical research as an organizing principle will help you come across at your best.  Good luck!

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