Given the limited options available to the pharmacy IT or pharmacy informatics professional in any given marketplace, it can be challenging to acquire the experience necessary to advance your career. If you live in a city with only two or three hospital IT or informatics departments, the opportunity for you to gain exposure to career options can be limiting. If you’re currently an informatics pharmacist or IT pharmacist, and you’d like to become a project leader or be in a management/director role in the future, the options you have within your current organization or any of the others in your local market may be restricting.
Your ability to gain additional experience depends significantly on the major initiatives these few organizations have on the near horizon. If you could move from new project to new project, you could be constantly adding to your résumé the type of experience that will make you an appealing candidate. However, if your current organization has put the brakes on new projects and other organizations in your local market are not hiring, it could require additional years for you to gain the experience necessary to go to the next level.
Under these circumstances, many people have begun to explore consulting firms as a next step in their career, as they provide valuable experience and expertise. But very often, organizations turn to consulting firms simply to augment their staff during projects of a finite nature. For most people, the biggest hurdle in getting into consulting is the ability to travel, being away from home three to four nights per week. But for those who are able to do so, working for a consulting firm is a way to make your skills and knowledge available to organizations outside of your local marketplace without having to look for a new job every six months to a year.
By joining a consulting firm that specializes in the pharmacy IT/pharmacy informatics space, you could find yourself gaining the same amount of experience in two years that could take double that amount of time if you were to stay with one hospital organization. Many people have left their current hospital organizations to join consulting firms and have gone back to hospital jobs in their local market two years later to find themselves taking on roles for which they wouldn’t have been qualified had they not made the move.
If you have a specific career path in mind, and have done the research necessary to know the experience required to advance to the next step, take the time to look into consulting firms that can give you what you need to get to that next step — in much less time.
You may also like: Do you like travel and variety in your work?
Comments