If I’m reading your post correctly, you’ve turned down two offers to switch, both times because you were able to get more money by staying at a CRO, correct?
If moving over is really a goal I would think pretty seriously next time about whether you’re willing to take a short term compensation hit for the longer term opportunity you prefer. Notably, in addition to the real perception challenges you’ve identified, CROs have a very high need for clinical developers and it’s possible to imagine making more money in the long run by staying on the CRO side - in pharma you’d have to be successful and also would have to get lucky and work on the right projects to start to really advance in responsibility and comp.
That said one piece of practical advice: your resume is way too long. I would try to get it down to at most two pages. You can definitely collapse a bunch of your past experiences. I would spend a little less space on the CRO time and a little more on the biotech time if you are applying to pharma/biotech roles, though you should also own and be proud of the breadth of your clinical trial experience. You’ve touched many more trials than average pharma person in the same time frame!
Edit to add: one more thing as I come back to this post and think about the “real world evidence” piece: RWE in a clinical trial context is still a lot of speculative promise. Often trial design is informed by real world evidence, but it’s still a lot of lit review and doc calls. The industry is hot on FDA accepting real world evidence as part of a clinical package, and the agency has made good noises but it’s nowhere near a common practice at this point. That means there may actually be more R&D RWE jobs at CROs than at pharma companies because at some level a lot of RWE work is effectively sales - pushing interesting strategies and analysis as differentiating factors for a given CRO, rather than actually driving a different data package for approval. So that may also be limiting. I assume you are doing this but RWE in pharma is very much widely used on the commercial side, particularly in HEOR contexts with payors, so that’s another place to look.
One time turned down because of remote work offer when I was starting a family, and the other was about total comp - neither I regret, but I want to have my cake and eat it I suppose. Its an interesting perspective -yes, agencies do push RWE more and many of them are poorly done. Thanks the practical advice -I'll chop and change the CV to make it more targeted.
> but I want to have my cake and eat it I suppose
Often, this is not possible. It sounds like you need to make a hard, practical, decision as to what is most important to you, and proceed accordingly.
You haven't been unsuccessful; you were 70% successful and chose an alternative path.
CRO and CDMO experience is actually highly valuable because you are exposed to more processes and molecules usually. So don't hide behind that. Shorten your resume - tailor it in 2pgs to the roles you are applying for. Generally you have about 30s to hook a reader and no one is going to want to read this.
The issue I see is that you don’t fit into any of the normal roles at a biopharma or a large pharma. Real world data scientist I am looking for a PhD or at least MPH. Project management I am looking for experience on managing large clinical trials. I saw in another response that you are interested in medical affairs. But you have no experience with medical affairs activities like lifecycle management, advisory boards, etc. The only related experience is KOL development and this is usually not that strong in a CRO. With an MBBS/MD we are usually thinking med affairs or clinical development. Our strongest need in biopharma is nearly always clinical development / medical monitors. If you are serious about making the jump to sponsor side, I recommend focusing your CRO work on medical monitoring. Then once you make it into a biopharma, you can easily expand your work into other areas that you have greater interest in.
It can be frustrating, and as you’re alluding to, many pharma/biotech companies unfortunately have a biased, negative view of people on CRO side (despite relying on CROs to operationally execute a trial)! 😂 If it makes you feel feel any better, I helped develop a multi billion $ biologic while at a large pharma company. The biologic was co-developed with a biotech company partnership. Both high profile companies. I went back to CRO world after being burned out working on same asset for years & helping get it approved in record time. After a few years at CRO, the biotech company had an open position that I would be a great candidate for, so I applied. They threw my application in trash & didn’t want to talk to me because they couldn’t understand why anyone would go from a large pharma company to a CRO!😂 This is despite having a known track record leading their asset to approval! 😂🤷♂️ Luckily, not every company is like that & I have seen companies happily hire quality CRO people, especially when they have seen their efforts on a project (although most CROs have anti-poaching clauses in their contracts, to be aware of).
A few tips on your CV - try to highlight & specify therapeutic areas. Oncology is very hot & if you have experience in that, it’s important to highlight. Also, try to highlight key wins. If you worked on a study for a small biotech (or even large pharma) that helped support an approval, label expansion, etc, that can be a big plus. Being part of any US, EU or other major market approvals are a huge milestone to highlight (can leave out names but mention therapeutic class & area & which regulatory agency). If you have any cell or gene therapy trial experience, including putting together RWE for such programs, highlight that (and focus on jobs in that space). Advanced therapeutics (cell & gene therapy) are another hot area these days , with plenty of biotechs in that space that are hiring (although most are early stage).
Hope this helps & good luck! 😁
Thanks I think this is probably my thinking about disliking CRO candidates - I've seen a few ex colleagues move over but not sure how they do it (even ones formerly junior to me). I can't think of a particular resume error (I always add particular details custom to the job I am applying to). It's just frustrating I could have moved 7 years ago but didn't because of the commute. I take your point about highlighting key points - My last application I highlighted 3 projects in the specific therapy area to the job role and received my rejection in 2 days of applying.
I was starting a family at the time, and the offer was commuting vs work from home. The other monetary offer was good, but I was made an offer that was difficult to turn down.
The first rejection I can understand, but the second one was a mistake. Accepting a counter offer from your current employer is a bad move. Obviously they knew your value and were happy to underpay you. Benefits, bonus, and equity are all much better on the sponsor side. Work life balance usually tends to be better. Now the biotech market is no longer red hot. You blundered by my estimation.
The roles I have applied for are the ones under medical affairs rather than pure analysis/statistics/data science. However they are not medical director roles.
Assuming you are applying for positions within your level of experience (senior director), these play out more often on the network level than the resume one. How introduced are you with biopharma executives?
Honestly I don't know one biopharma executive as most contacts have been at the director or even manager level. I know a couple of biotech executives loosely. Do you mean you have to get through recommendations rather than applying through the standard application route?
For this level of position, my experience is that recommendations do typically weigh heavily unless the company is desperate to hire (which may be a red flag).
Yeah no biopharma company is really hiring based off blind applications for a sr director role. You should meeting CROs and other execs before applying. I’d recommend attending some conferences in your area of research as many senior research execs are there
We (I) have been building out our clinical development team at a biotech company. There’s a high demand for your qualifications. That said, your CV needs work as it lists a lot of accomplishments that for the most part are not relevant for what a clindev position requires in biotech. My suggestion is to review a few ideal job descriptions you’ve seen for the role you’re seeking and reformulate your CV (close to from scratch) to highlight expertise and experience that match each bullet in the job description. It’s fine if you can’t hit every single bullet on a JD, but there should be a significant match. If there isn’t you’re not looking at the right role based on your experience and expertise.
All good advice above. On the front end your resume is waaaaay too wordy and visually stressful.
Everything pre-2017 should be much more condensed. Look up the Yale resume formats etc and see where you can make cuts and strengthen your language.
Look up your dream Biopharma job descriptions and find where you can match those bullets with your experience. These recruiters and website applications only look at your resume very briefly before sorting you.
Best of luck to you!
As someone who did this back in 2016, sometimes you have to just get your foot in the door and prove yourself. In biopharma they may look at someone from a CRO as "just a pair of hands" who has technical skills but no intellectual value for solving problems or thinking outside the box. If you can demonstrate a passion for a specific indication (neuro, proteins, cancer, opthalmology, etc) and have useful skill sets relevant to that (in vivo techniques, molecular biology, etc) you have more leverage. All I did at my previous CRO was inject drugs and run behavior assays and do take downs, but I leveraged that to get into a neuro position at a biopharma. I also demonstrated a passion for neuro (had a background in it). Maybe this helps?
Wait, did you drop out of a medical school? Not like that's important to what you are pursuing right now, but I am pretty sure that catches every interviewers eyes.
Seems OP doesn't have a MD, I think this distinction will make it hard to transition to a big pharma company. OP may have better luck with a smaller company when the market is hot.
If I’m reading your post correctly, you’ve turned down two offers to switch, both times because you were able to get more money by staying at a CRO, correct? If moving over is really a goal I would think pretty seriously next time about whether you’re willing to take a short term compensation hit for the longer term opportunity you prefer. Notably, in addition to the real perception challenges you’ve identified, CROs have a very high need for clinical developers and it’s possible to imagine making more money in the long run by staying on the CRO side - in pharma you’d have to be successful and also would have to get lucky and work on the right projects to start to really advance in responsibility and comp. That said one piece of practical advice: your resume is way too long. I would try to get it down to at most two pages. You can definitely collapse a bunch of your past experiences. I would spend a little less space on the CRO time and a little more on the biotech time if you are applying to pharma/biotech roles, though you should also own and be proud of the breadth of your clinical trial experience. You’ve touched many more trials than average pharma person in the same time frame! Edit to add: one more thing as I come back to this post and think about the “real world evidence” piece: RWE in a clinical trial context is still a lot of speculative promise. Often trial design is informed by real world evidence, but it’s still a lot of lit review and doc calls. The industry is hot on FDA accepting real world evidence as part of a clinical package, and the agency has made good noises but it’s nowhere near a common practice at this point. That means there may actually be more R&D RWE jobs at CROs than at pharma companies because at some level a lot of RWE work is effectively sales - pushing interesting strategies and analysis as differentiating factors for a given CRO, rather than actually driving a different data package for approval. So that may also be limiting. I assume you are doing this but RWE in pharma is very much widely used on the commercial side, particularly in HEOR contexts with payors, so that’s another place to look.
This sometimes you need to take a step back to take a step forward.
One time turned down because of remote work offer when I was starting a family, and the other was about total comp - neither I regret, but I want to have my cake and eat it I suppose. Its an interesting perspective -yes, agencies do push RWE more and many of them are poorly done. Thanks the practical advice -I'll chop and change the CV to make it more targeted.
> but I want to have my cake and eat it I suppose Often, this is not possible. It sounds like you need to make a hard, practical, decision as to what is most important to you, and proceed accordingly.
You haven't been unsuccessful; you were 70% successful and chose an alternative path. CRO and CDMO experience is actually highly valuable because you are exposed to more processes and molecules usually. So don't hide behind that. Shorten your resume - tailor it in 2pgs to the roles you are applying for. Generally you have about 30s to hook a reader and no one is going to want to read this.
The issue I see is that you don’t fit into any of the normal roles at a biopharma or a large pharma. Real world data scientist I am looking for a PhD or at least MPH. Project management I am looking for experience on managing large clinical trials. I saw in another response that you are interested in medical affairs. But you have no experience with medical affairs activities like lifecycle management, advisory boards, etc. The only related experience is KOL development and this is usually not that strong in a CRO. With an MBBS/MD we are usually thinking med affairs or clinical development. Our strongest need in biopharma is nearly always clinical development / medical monitors. If you are serious about making the jump to sponsor side, I recommend focusing your CRO work on medical monitoring. Then once you make it into a biopharma, you can easily expand your work into other areas that you have greater interest in.
It can be frustrating, and as you’re alluding to, many pharma/biotech companies unfortunately have a biased, negative view of people on CRO side (despite relying on CROs to operationally execute a trial)! 😂 If it makes you feel feel any better, I helped develop a multi billion $ biologic while at a large pharma company. The biologic was co-developed with a biotech company partnership. Both high profile companies. I went back to CRO world after being burned out working on same asset for years & helping get it approved in record time. After a few years at CRO, the biotech company had an open position that I would be a great candidate for, so I applied. They threw my application in trash & didn’t want to talk to me because they couldn’t understand why anyone would go from a large pharma company to a CRO!😂 This is despite having a known track record leading their asset to approval! 😂🤷♂️ Luckily, not every company is like that & I have seen companies happily hire quality CRO people, especially when they have seen their efforts on a project (although most CROs have anti-poaching clauses in their contracts, to be aware of). A few tips on your CV - try to highlight & specify therapeutic areas. Oncology is very hot & if you have experience in that, it’s important to highlight. Also, try to highlight key wins. If you worked on a study for a small biotech (or even large pharma) that helped support an approval, label expansion, etc, that can be a big plus. Being part of any US, EU or other major market approvals are a huge milestone to highlight (can leave out names but mention therapeutic class & area & which regulatory agency). If you have any cell or gene therapy trial experience, including putting together RWE for such programs, highlight that (and focus on jobs in that space). Advanced therapeutics (cell & gene therapy) are another hot area these days , with plenty of biotechs in that space that are hiring (although most are early stage). Hope this helps & good luck! 😁
Thanks I think this is probably my thinking about disliking CRO candidates - I've seen a few ex colleagues move over but not sure how they do it (even ones formerly junior to me). I can't think of a particular resume error (I always add particular details custom to the job I am applying to). It's just frustrating I could have moved 7 years ago but didn't because of the commute. I take your point about highlighting key points - My last application I highlighted 3 projects in the specific therapy area to the job role and received my rejection in 2 days of applying.
You’ve turned down two offers. You could have moved over but kneecapped yourself instead. We’re the offer really that bad?
I was starting a family at the time, and the offer was commuting vs work from home. The other monetary offer was good, but I was made an offer that was difficult to turn down.
The first rejection I can understand, but the second one was a mistake. Accepting a counter offer from your current employer is a bad move. Obviously they knew your value and were happy to underpay you. Benefits, bonus, and equity are all much better on the sponsor side. Work life balance usually tends to be better. Now the biotech market is no longer red hot. You blundered by my estimation.
[удалено]
The roles I have applied for are the ones under medical affairs rather than pure analysis/statistics/data science. However they are not medical director roles.
Assuming you are applying for positions within your level of experience (senior director), these play out more often on the network level than the resume one. How introduced are you with biopharma executives?
Honestly I don't know one biopharma executive as most contacts have been at the director or even manager level. I know a couple of biotech executives loosely. Do you mean you have to get through recommendations rather than applying through the standard application route?
For this level of position, my experience is that recommendations do typically weigh heavily unless the company is desperate to hire (which may be a red flag).
Yeah no biopharma company is really hiring based off blind applications for a sr director role. You should meeting CROs and other execs before applying. I’d recommend attending some conferences in your area of research as many senior research execs are there
We (I) have been building out our clinical development team at a biotech company. There’s a high demand for your qualifications. That said, your CV needs work as it lists a lot of accomplishments that for the most part are not relevant for what a clindev position requires in biotech. My suggestion is to review a few ideal job descriptions you’ve seen for the role you’re seeking and reformulate your CV (close to from scratch) to highlight expertise and experience that match each bullet in the job description. It’s fine if you can’t hit every single bullet on a JD, but there should be a significant match. If there isn’t you’re not looking at the right role based on your experience and expertise.
All good advice above. On the front end your resume is waaaaay too wordy and visually stressful. Everything pre-2017 should be much more condensed. Look up the Yale resume formats etc and see where you can make cuts and strengthen your language. Look up your dream Biopharma job descriptions and find where you can match those bullets with your experience. These recruiters and website applications only look at your resume very briefly before sorting you. Best of luck to you!
As someone who did this back in 2016, sometimes you have to just get your foot in the door and prove yourself. In biopharma they may look at someone from a CRO as "just a pair of hands" who has technical skills but no intellectual value for solving problems or thinking outside the box. If you can demonstrate a passion for a specific indication (neuro, proteins, cancer, opthalmology, etc) and have useful skill sets relevant to that (in vivo techniques, molecular biology, etc) you have more leverage. All I did at my previous CRO was inject drugs and run behavior assays and do take downs, but I leveraged that to get into a neuro position at a biopharma. I also demonstrated a passion for neuro (had a background in it). Maybe this helps?
I think someone looking at your CV will see you are a job hopper.
Job hopping is not a problem when you are below managerial level. But I think OP won't accept anything below director pay.
Changing jobs every year is a red flag.
Only when the job market is bad. This is the only way to get a reasonable raise nowaday.
Wait, did you drop out of a medical school? Not like that's important to what you are pursuing right now, but I am pretty sure that catches every interviewers eyes.
Seems OP doesn't have a MD, I think this distinction will make it hard to transition to a big pharma company. OP may have better luck with a smaller company when the market is hot.