5 Steps to Landing Your First Medical Writing Role
Looking back 10 years as a Medical Writer, here’s what I would recommend to someone today who is looking to apply for their first role in Medical Writing.
In my two earlier posts ‘The Mighty Medical Writer–What Do Medical Writers Do’ and ‘What Do Medical Writers Actually Do? The Story of a Pen, a Mask, and a Vaccine’, I’ve described essentially what our amazing profession is and what sort of work we do, respectively. And yes, they are blogs with entirely different content.
If you’re intrigued, you’ll probably want to start applying for jobs, and this is the blog for you.
I suppose the strategy for landing a Medical Writing job is not too different to other industries. But here are some of my personal experiences and advice on landing your first Medical Writing role in a medical communications, or medcomms, agency.
I’ve worked at (hence applied for) a number of agencies and I’ve hired Medical Writers to join my team, so I’ve been on both sides of the job/candidate seeking process. I use ‘medcomms’ here as an umbrella term, as some agencies brand themselves as specialists in healthcare/promotional communications, and some in an entirely different specialty of Medical Writing, but they do generally fall under ‘medcomms’.
Let’s get into these 5 steps.
1. Get ahead of others
This step is optional, but highly recommended! That’s because it will give you an advantage over other candidates who didn’t go through this step.
As far as I know, there are no Bachelor of Medical Writing courses or college programmes that allow you to graduate as a Medical Writer. But there is now a surge of introductory industry courses to Medical Writing delivered by experienced Medical Writers.
I have personally completed industry courses to health and medical writing from the Health Writer Hub (by Michelle Guillemard) and Green Pen Solutions (by Sarah Nelson) and they were great!
They typically go through the practical aspects of a Medical Writer, teach you the relevant skills that most agencies seek, and assign you real project assignments — so you will be fully equipped on your first day of work (or at least get you through a few rounds of the job interview process that I mention later).
I know some agencies may even offer internships and some of the larger agencies offer graduate programs for complete beginners to the medcomms industry. The ones I know of include ‘Nucleus Academy’ from Nucleus Global, and ‘Monster Academy’ from Word Monster — this last one may not sound like a conventional name, well because it’s not a conventional medcomms agency, but I assure you it’s real).
Tip: Look up resources from leading associations like the American Medical Writers Association (AMWA) and European Medical Writers Association (EMWA). There is a wealth of information on these websites. (They are pronounced ‘am-wah’ and ‘em-wah’ — just so you don’t sound like a noob when mentioning these organisations.)
2. Find your opportunities
If there’s no supply, then there’s no demand. The first thing you need to ensure is that an agency has an open vacancy. That’s pretty obvious. What’s not obvious is that under rare circumstances, an agency may still hire you even though there is no vacancy (it’s true and it can happen — my firsthand experience, but for another time!). But let’s talk about the obvious roadmap to landing a Medical Writing role in a medcomms agency.
There’s a few different ways to find out about Medical Writing job vacancies — job searching websites, company websites, professional networking, recruitment agencies, etc.
I personally like LinkedIn and find it very effective, because it’s an easy-to-use and accessible professional networking platform. You can literally search “medical writing” under Jobs, filter by geography, and Bob’s your uncle. If you found an opening — please proceed to step 3.
Tip: When I was hiring Medical Writers, I also used LinkedIn to search for potential candidates, so ensure your LinkedIn profile is well polished.
But according to the ‘backwards law’, the more you try pursuing something, the more likely you will not find it. And when you’re not actively seeking, it comes to your doorstep. So if there are currently no job openings for a Medical Writing role, you can still sow the seed, so to speak. And do not despair, vacancies always pop up from time to time.
But for now, you can do a few things. Do some desk research on agencies (here is a non-exhaustive list of companies that Peter Llewellyn has put together – but you’ll have to do your own Googling for Australian-based agencies). Follow the LinkedIn pages of different agencies, because it’s very easy and economical for them to advertise job openings on their own LinkedIn account. And when they post, it will show up in your feed.
Connect with recruiters who specialise in scientific and medical communications. These people’s job is to find people a job (on behalf of the agency), so they will sift through hundreds of LinkedIn profiles and CVs of potential candidates and will reach out to you. Don’t worry, their finder’s fee come out of the employer’s pocket and not yours 😊.
This means, you better have a relevant, tailored and up-to-date LinkedIn profile with all the key words and phrases of the industry ‘lingo’ cleverly scattered in your profile description (you should do this with your CV as well).
You can be more direct and email (or LinkedIn message) the agency’s HR team or even the Editorial Director/Office Lead (or equivalent) to express your interest in working for them. If they are receptive, leave your CV with them. Catchup every few months or so, because they are busy people and you could get lucky by simply emailing at the right place and right time.
Job seeking websites are another avenue to finding an opportunity. Most of the time the same posts are available on LinkedIn, but you may come across a hidden gem.
Tip: If you’re reading this, chances are you’re coming from an academic/science background, which is like 97% of people I’ve interviewed. So how can you tailor your CV and LinkedIn profile to get noticed?
If you’ve read my last blog on ‘What Do Medical Writers Actually Do? The Story of a Pen, a Mask, and a Vaccine’, you’ll see that your experiences at scientific conferences and publishing journal articles are very relevant to Medical Writing. So you’ll probably want to emphasise that, and not your lab record speed of pipetting reagents into 96 wells of a PCR experiment.
3. Interview round 1. The casual chat
So you’ve got your first step in the door, whether it’s through a recruiter or directly with the employer. Usually, you’ll be invited to have a brief chat with HR/Talent Acquisition (or equivalent). Here, the agency can find out a bit about you and you can find out a bit about them.
There will be simple questions around why you’re applying for this position, what is your basic understanding of the medcomms industry etc. and ‘sense-checking’ whether you’ve chosen the right career path.
If you’ve done your research and believe that Medical Writing is the career for you, you’ll likely pass this first round.
Tip: Any AI chatbot can generate some interview questions to help you prepare for this. But try and connect with some actual Medical Writers and see if they’re willing to give you a few pointers. You can start off with me.
4. Interview round 2. The test
If you’re applying for a Medical Writing role, you better be able to prove that you can write well. But a Medical Writer is not just about writing well, you’ll need to internalise complex medical and scientific information, and communicate it to a target audience. So most, if not all, agencies will ask you to do a writing test.
Of the candidates that pass round 1, there can be anywhere up to 10 people per vacancy invited to do the writing test. This can come in several forms, but having done 6 of these writing tests for different companies myself, they are generally the same.
You may be asked to do any (or a combination) of the following: 1) write an abstract based on a publication or congress poster; 2) develop a slide presentation for a speaker to deliver key results of a clinical trial at an international scientific conference; or 3) even write a short feature article about a disease. You may get made-up materials or it could be based on actual published materials.
Thinking back, one of my writing tasks was quite out of the ordinary. My then manager gave me a long paragraph taken from the story of Peter Pan and introduced some editorial errors into it. And she asked me to edit it! Thanks Cat Panwar!
Tip: Do not use generative AI tools like ChatGPT to do your writing assignment. There are anti-genAI-like tools that can spot these. Experienced assessors can also confidently tell whether your writing was drafted by a human or generated by machine.
These writing tasks not only give you a good idea of what a Medical Writer does in their day-to-day job, but it also gives the employer a chance to see your potential as a Medical Writer. We look for your ability to interpret scientific/medical information and any reasoning behind your decisions, spot errors and typos, and of course write well (i.e. grammar and punctuation).
Tip: Presentation is also important, so don’t just use Times New Roman at size 12 for everything — format your writing task appropriately, but don’t go overboard with a rainbow of colours, fonts and styles.
I won’t lie, most people fail at this second round. I have marked many writing assessments and the quality varies widely.
Tip: Read the brief, or the instructions, that were given to you. Read it again and again until you’ve truly understood what’s being asked of you. If you have any queries, go back and have them clarified. This shows that you’re not afraid of asking questions. Once you’ve drafted your assignment, take a break and come back to finesse it another time. You’ll be surprised at how many changes you can make even though you think that is the final version to submit — and this is a Medical Writer trait that is widely shared among our kind!
5. Interview round 3. The actual interview
This step is really the only actual part of a job interview, or what people perceive as a panel of VIPs grilling you with questions, and making your body tremble and armpits sweat — none of my experiences were like that! All my interviews were very positive and all my interviewers were very nice.
As the name implies, ‘the interview’ is as much of an opportunity for the employer to know you, as well as for you to know them. Here, you’ll generally be asked many questions, including some repeat questions in step 3 and some other more job-specific questions.
They can be broad like, ‘what does medical writing mean to you’, ‘explain in your words how the pharma industry works’, ‘how do you work as a team/individual’, ‘how did you approach the writing test’. Or it can be based on a scenario like ‘what would you do when authors have conflicting feedback on a manuscript draft.’
Again, generative AI tools can help formulate some sample Q&A for you, but try and adapt them to your knowledge and experience — the employer is not looking to hire ChatGPT.
If you’ve been invited for the interview, then you can assume you’ve got what it takes to be a Medical Writer having ‘passed’ your writing test. Because most people fail at round 2, there’s usually 1–3 candidates remaining, so your chances of landing your first Medical Writing gig is getting real close!
Tip: It may be very cliché, but prepare and ask many questions as this is one of your last chances to impress your employer. It also shows them your passion and dedication, which mean bonus points. You may also want to know if you’re a good fit for the team — so ask questions about the people you’ll be working with.
Tip: If your interview went beyond the scheduled time, that’s a great sign — so make sure you don’t have something back-to-back.
Last but not least, if this blog has helped you land your first Medical Writing role, let me know too.
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Abbreviations: AI, artificial intelligence; CV, curriculum vitae; HR, human resources; PCR, polymerase chain reaction; VIP, very important person.
