What is a Pharmaceutical Representative Job?

Pharmaceutical representative is the pharmaceutical salesperson or drug reps who provides information on drug and product samples to physicians. Also it is the pharmaceutical representative who keeps an eye on the physicians' prescribing pattern in a particular area and get back to his or her company with the details. Pharmaceutical representative works for a single or a group of drugs and meet the physicians practising in that specific field only.

At present there are about 100,000 pharmaceutical sales reps in the United States. A single representative meets or calls around 200 physician in the period of 1-2 weeks.

Pharmaceutical representative job involves much of field work and less of office work. Most of the time pharmaceutical reps have meetings with physicians of their territory. If not physicians they also meet the physicians' practices. Apart from these daily meeting with physicians, pharmaceutical representative job also include the sales meeting, training sessions and other calls.

To get into the pharmaceutical representative job one must be a college graduate with bachelor's degree. It would be an added advantage if you have bachelors in science as you will have to know and memorize the names of drugs and detailed info on different medicines. Apart from this he or she must have excellent communication skills, marketing skills and very professional attitude. Also the pharmaceutical representative must be very organized and has the ability to work under pressure.

As this industry is growing very swiftly so there are many pharmaceutical representative career options. Pharma companies need someone to promote and do branding of their products and this is handled by the Marketing and the Product Management team. This team has the pharmaceutical representatives and medical representatives who meet physicians to promote the old and new drugs. Also they take orders from the hospitals, private clinics and medicine shops.

Moreover the career path is just great in this field. The pharmaceutical representative can reach to the managerial level with shear hard-work and right education. You can become the district or sales manager and then the Director of sales, Senior Director and can reach upto the Vice President position in the pharmaceutical companies.

Pharmaceutical representative have career options like in managed care, hospital accounts and the one that is booming in today's industry is of Scientific liaisons. This is also called medical science liaisons (MSLs). These specialists play important role in the product's life cycle management.

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If you compare the pharmaceutical representative salary then it is more as compare to other sales jobs. This is the main reason why the pharmaceutical representative job is in demand. The approximate salary of the pharmaceutical reps

Along with salary there are many perks like trips, bonuses, medical and housing benefits, retirement benefits etc that allure the grads to move toward this job. Along with this the pharmaceutical representative career is very long and lucrative if you have the capability of reaching at the top.

Find the Pharmaceutical Market Trends 2010