I hold a master’s degree in Bio-Chemistry, I wish to start my career in this field. I haven’t done any course in clinical research.

My question is can I get job in this field with basic knowledge in clinical research.

In all of these years, I’ve never made a dime in referral money and neither have my peers because we knew people who we would’ve recommend to try being a CRA but companies were never interested because they had no experience. The ones with experience don’t need people to refer them so referral money is rarely made.

As a CRA, if you miss something at a research facility and the FDA or drug company sends an auditor to your assigned facility, you are going down if they check behind you and find a bunch of mistakes and misses. That’s the part of being a CRA that no one talks about. You have to know FDA guidelines inside out and it takes lots of practice. You can do your work but it had better be accurate because someone else is always coming right behind you to double check. Like I said, it’s not as simple and glamourous as it sounds. It’s just like YOUR job!

If you make a mistake and miss something important (like not detecting that a subject is taking a medication that should not be mixed with the study drug), then a person could get seriously hurt, hospitalized or killed and you’ll end up getting fired or sued. Your name will be mud and companies won’t hire you. It can and has happened. Pharma is a very small world. You always run into the same people (so be nice to everyone) because it’s so hard for new people to get in since they have no experience and companies want skilled people who can travel right away. You wouldn’t want to be a CRA unless you KNOW what you are doing. People want to do it for money but they wouldn’t have a clue about how to do it accurately unless they’ve had at least 5+ years of training over many different studies.

There’s a reason why we are paid what we get. It’s because it’s hard work and most wouldn’t last because they’d get fired. It’s not easy money. I do it because it’s been years and I know what I’m doing at this point. I get good seats now because I have a ton of miles and elite airline status. It took me a lot of time though. It’s not the type of job that you should give up your current career for in this economy when you have no experience. I’ve seen people do that and they got fired because they didn’t know what they were doing and companies aren’t willing to spend money like they used to to train you. If they got hired, they didn’t get even close to the kind of money they thought they would based on what they’d heard from those who glorify the CRA job.

You wouldn’t just apply for an MD or real estate job would you? No, because you’d need to be skilled and trained. Being a CRA is the same thing. You can’t just do it because you like how it sounds. It’s wrong to jeopardize lives because you want a good income, which you won’t get anyway unless you do it for years and prove yourself. You still need to understand what you are doing.

Plus, it takes years to be able to charge the real money that this article mentions. In the beginning, I made $35K as a CRA. They aren’t going to pay you the big bucks until you have a huge track record, which the article does refer to under Section #3 (proven track record and good references).