How Training Empowers Expertise, Compliance, and Sales in Pharma
The pharmaceutical industry continues to face many challenges, both familiar and novel. Companies are heavily regulated by the government and must adhere to several guidelines to ensure the safety and efficacy of their products. Moreover, a lack of proficient and talented employees along with vigorous competition puts companies at risk of falling behind their competitors. For example, pharmaceutical companies have been fined over $13 billion for fraudulent marketing practices, including the promotion of medicines for uses that were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
Continuous training can serve as a solution to many problems and help companies produce pharma products under the strictest manufacturing standards to provide care for people and change their lives for the better.
Three key areas to constantly train and develop
L&D professionals, as well as managers, should be fully engaged in developing their employees and helping them meet their professional goals in addition to aligning their interests with specific business objectives. Training should be focused on three main areas to help all employees (chemists, technical personnel, chemical engineers, sales reps, administrators, etc.) grow professionally within a company.
Here are three main areas that L&D professionals should constantly develop in their teams:
1. General skills training
General skills involve industry and job-specific learning courses such as:
- Human anatomy and physiology.
This usually includes information on cells and tissues, the functions of different organs, organ systems, and various health conditions.
- Diseases
These courses answer questions like: What diseases or disorders are being treated by the pharmaceutical company where employees work? What are the symptoms of these diseases?
- Drugs
These courses cover questions like: In what way do drugs help to cure a specific disease? What are the indications for drug use? What are the possible side-effects? Also, it can inform learners about pharmacovigilance (or drug safety) that is relevant during pre-marketing as well as post-marketing, through all clinical phases, in order to identify and evaluate previously unreported adverse reactions.
Scott M. Wheelwright, co-founder and principal consultant at Complya Asia, explains how this kind of training can influence a company’s culture and employees’ accountability:
It was very interesting for me as a freshman engineer to learn the science of the biology and virology that underlay our product development work and how this impacted the patients who used our products. This early connection to patients has benefited me throughout my career as I have focused on bringing products to market in order to relieve suffering among patients. One of the joys of working in the pharmaceutical industry is that many of my colleagues also gain an emotional and spiritual benefit from helping the patients we serve.
Additionally, employees should also be taught essential business skills like negotiation and communication, planning, project management, leadership, time management, adaptability and flexibility, technology skills, critical thinking, among other skills to be able to quickly adapt to future changes in the workplace.
