The pharmaceuticals, life sciences and related industries are facing a great challenge of talent at this moment. On one hand there is a talent supply and demand gap while supply is lesser than demand and on the other hand challenges of attrition amongst existing human resources are as high as 20 percent for sales professionals to around eight percent in Management and Executives cadre!
Trends: professional pharmaceutical selling personnel
In order to look at this phenomenon more from the grass root level, you can appreciate that there is no desirability as well as motivation for anybody to join this profession of pharmaceutical selling as it has lost its charm in the mid 70's and beginning of 80's. Somewhere during this period this noble profession of Medical Service Men / Medical representatives who used to occupy a clear positioning of providing medical information and keeping the customers updated got fully sacrificed. There were expectations from this group of professionals earlier.
However, as the 80's ended, one of the successful multi-nationals changed the focus of this profession towards sales alone. This group received skills of communication and selling. The medical contents were robbed from this profession.
Over a period, intense competition forced sales and marketing professionals to deploy marketing and selling tactics and the same communicators or salesmen became more skillful in trading. In other words, the desirability of this medical service professional lowered down to a level of just trading and replacing stocks. On the front of prescription generation, it stated pursuing CRM activities. Most of the products became generic and acquired the status of commodities. The differentiation amongst products got lost.
Although, this U graph, is likely to come back again to where it was in 70's as many specialists companies are now looking at this particular job profile and man profile in such a way that the desirability and motivation is likely to improve over a period of years.
However, industry has to consider this background and work towards ensuring that there is the desirability, motivation and distinction in this grass root job so that pharma sales professionals get their respect back from their customers.
It's a fact that, this model of communicating through Medical Representation has not become bankrupt in any country so far. As pharma selling is a consultative selling, it needs lot of medical, technical, commercial knowledge and business skills to perform the role effectively and adequately. For this endeavour, industry needs to focus on this group of professionals.
Executives and managerial professionals:
As the entry level is indulging in trading and selling, strategic intent and content remained at a tactical level. Thematic inputs became less pre-dominant over tactical inputs. So, as an industry, it could not attract required talent from outside.
Hence, in case of other executives, managerial personnel remained internal from industry and no fresh thoughts could enter the industry. As a result, there is a clear amount of gap in demand and supply of those who need to revamp the industry.
Technical personnel:
Talent supply is lagging behind the demand, as candidated need many academic qualifications as well as adherences to regulatory affairs, intellectual property rights and also adaptability to IT, HR and Finance practices.
Those who are engaged in R&D, clinical trials, manufacturing, quality assurance and other developmental aspects of existing as well as new products face a tremendous gap between industry demand and supply from academics.
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Overall:
Simultaneously, if you look at the last 10 years, employee costs are rising, average age of employees is changing and multi-generation employees exist in any given organisation.
Issues:
These trends identify three major issues which industry is facing and it calls for a very critical introspection to make it flourish. The issues are as follows:
- Non-availability of right human resources from academic institutions for technical and other areas of research, clinical trials and manufacturing.
- Impact of inbreeding of managerial personnel from industry alone
- No desirability and motivation at entry level of pharma selling.
It's a clear case of employability.
Employability:
All jobs need high degree of precision, quality, adherence to the regulatory / ethical standards in sales, marketing, manufacturing, research, development and all other technical aspects as ultimately we are delivering solutions for the health of human beings. As there is intense competition at sales management and executive levels, we also need a different attitude and willingness to work with extra focus and excellence.
Employability gap:
This employability gap is due to not only shortage or supply of talent but is sometimes also a result of outdated educational curriculum, other related education and skill level which is required for the industry as a whole and for the job specifically. As a result, although there is a good research pool from different universities available at all levels, the employable pool is shrinking every time. Hence employees who have acquired skills and attitude are more susceptible to newer opportunities at higher pay scales, resulting in an eight to 20 percent attrition rate at different levels.
In other words, to be employed becomes a risk. This risk can be judged only as a danger, it may be an opportunity too. It could be a danger due to environmental conditions, economical conditions and the inability of the management to make organisations grow. A number of jobs may become redundant. It becomes an opportunity for these employee because they have acquired certain skills and have aligned their attitudes towards working in the pharma domain so they are better employable than those who are not employable at all. That's the reason why when Peter Hawkins talks about employability, he says… "To be employed is to be at risk , to be employable is to be stable."
Skills:
Besides, academic qualification, students lack self reliance skills (such as self-promotion, self awareness, networking), people skills (such as team working, communication, leadership) and general skills (such as problem solving, entrepreneurial acumen, numeracy and overall commitment). Employability also needs specialists skills and in pharma and healthcare specific occupational skills and technical skills are equally important to understand and interact in the common language of the customer. As everything at the end needs economic performance, they also need to know about commerce and commercial benefit.
Need of the hour:
If you look at these situations and the issues and challenges in our industry, the need of the hour is to ensure constant learning, continuous upgradation of functional as well as coping skills and overall personal training as the entire world is a flux.
If you look at the existing skills shortage, you would find the shortage is experienced at all levels right from managerial to sales, manufacturing to supply chain, formulation to healthcare in the entire pharma domain. The shortage can be of varying degree in different functions.
Employability partnerships:
Is there a need for partnerships between educational institutions and pharma industry?
Should they come together on a platform and deal with the situation together rather than looking at supply at one end and demand on the other end, making life miserable for both?
Is there scope for those who would like to work on such partnerships and develop 21st century skills for employability in India?
Can we address the employability issue of pharma , healthcare, life sciences and related industry?
Let's resolve these issues of industry and evolve the industry together.
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