Senior Scientist at AstraZeneca: Part 3. Recruitment and Interviews For Big Pharma

In this episode, an AstraZeneca senior scientist talked to us about how he landed his job.
Key considerations:
1) Network with people both above you and below you on the career ladder.
2) Custom-made your cover letter. Think of meta skills required for the job rather than the actual skills.
3) Show them that you are flexible and versatile.
4) The faster the company gets back to you, the more likely you are to get the job.
5) Apply for more positions so that you can choose the position rather than the position choose you.
6) Treat job applications and interviews as a practice. Get better at interviews by being interviewed.
7) STAR model for interviews. It is more about how you carry yourself during the interview rather than your answer. Practice, practice, practice.
8) Soft skills are more important than hard skills.
9) They will look for signs in your behaviour showing that you match their ethos.
During my Phd I worked for:
- Brilliant Club Chairty thebrilliantcl...
- iGEM igem.org/
- my univerisity salsa society
My favourite software:
- document management and referencing: Mendeley, Zotero
- Image processing: ImageJ
- Creating figures: Inkspace, Illustrator, GraphPad Prism
- Spellchecker: Grammarly.com
- Formatting checker: PerfectIT
Some of these are paid but your University might have a subscirption!
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[@ani-ib3dp]

very helpful video

[@emileachou1965]

Very nice talk, and thank you for those valuable peaces of information.
What would be the best Ph.D. program to increase your chances of being accepted as a senior scientist in a big pharmaceutical company? What are the most demanding requirements for the big pharmaceutical industry, and based on this, which Ph.D. should I choose? Note: I have a master’s degree in human genetics and genomics.”

[@DrMatJ]

Hi, thank you for watching and great questions! I had a chat with Pat (the interviewee from this video) and we came up with the following suggestions. Big pharma (and everyone else) always need people with bioinformatics (Python), statistics (SPSS), and programming experience (R). Depending on the field you chose, R&D teams in big pharma will need people with experience in immunology, microbiology, and virology. Analytical teams will need experts in protein purification and Mass Spec. If you want to go more towards Contract Research Organizations rather than Pharma, they always need people with experience in pharmacokinetics in animal and human studies. I hope this helps!