Question:
I'm considering a career in pharmacy. I'm currently enrolled in
college to finish up my last classes for my degree. I was wondering if
anyone had any suggestions about the quickest way to get employment in
this field. If anyone knows what area (city, state) is in need of
pharmacist..
This research is required for one of the classes that I am taking.
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Answer:
- As far as I know to be a pharmacist you must attend pharmacy school and have
a B.A. in pharmacy or a Pharm.D. The B.A. has pretty much been phased out
though. Pharmacists are in high demand. It would not be hard to find a job
as one if you have the proper credentials.
- I've found that the first step is to decide if you are willing to move,
as clearly your options are much
more limited if you are commited to staying in your current area.
The first step is to, if possible, get some experience (perhaps as an
intern), and get excellent letter(s) of
recommendations from relavent people (not just your friend/family member).
Preferably, the references will be related to pharmacy work. If not,
probably the best is getting letters
of recommendation from your teachers.
The next step is to write a really good resume. I spent over a month
really making mine nice. Unless
your english is fantastic, maks sure to have several friends (hopefully
somebody with excellent grammar),
and run it through a spell checker... don't assume that the spell
checker catches every spelling mistake, as
spell checkers just see if each word is in the dictionary or not... if
you mispell 'to' as 'two', it will not
report any error. Remember, your resume is the only document that
potential employers have to judge you
by, except for the cover letter.
If you can find a headhunter, clearly they won't help, as you can always
reject any interviews/job offers.
I'd post your resume to any relavent internet groups like
misc.jobs.resumes and read misc.jobs.offered,
and you probably want to submit your resume to appropriate
local/wider-range job sites like monster.com.
There are many of them, and usually the employer pays.
Of course, you should check the classifieds, especially if you want to
stay local.
Each resume should have a cover letter. I remember I sent over 500
resumes out, and most cover letters were
computer generated, but the places I really wanted to go to, I wrote a
special letter in which I emphasized
why I wanted to work at their company.
One thing I found is helpful is to include a at least 3 references with
each resume. Almost every place will
ask for it anyway and having them included with the resume, gives the
impression you're want them to talk
to the references as opposed to making them ask you for them. Of
course, it's vital to make sure you get
permission from your references to use them as references, and also make
sure that they will all give only
positive feedback to those that call about you.
If you have good grades, you should include a copy of your transcript
with your resume.
By the way, if like me, you send out hundreds of resumes, make sure you
try to spread out the signing
and if not automated, addressing, the envelopes. I made the mistake of
doing them all in a day and my hand
hurt a great deal from the signing. You'd be surprised at how much that
hurts (at least I was).
If you're willing to move, I'd send special resumes to major pharmacies
like CVS, Walgreens, Rite-AID,
major HMOs, etc... By special, I mean write really good cover letters.
Make sure to mention that where you'd
be willing to move to (and perhaps also your preferences (for instance
if you prefer the northeast USA, state so,
and mention if you are not willing to move to California, mention that).
The overall idea behind all this is that you want to think like you're
an employer searching for an employee. Many
people will put four years into studying, etc... and just take the first
job that comes there way. Also, I was told by
my career services department that 'blind mailings like you're doing
never work... you won't get a single intereview'.
I wound up getting over 40 offers and going on about 15-20 (after a
point, I got a good enough offer from one place
that many others couldn't compete, either in terms of how interesting
the job was or the pay/benefits, so going on
the interview would have been a waste of time, which was at a premium as
I was taking a full courseload during
the interviews, most of which were hundreds or thousands of miles away
(don't worry... the company always pays
for all expenses for an interview, at least in my field -- I had degrees
in math and computer science). Anyway,
I got about 15 offers, including the highest salary for a recent grad
with my degrees in my schools history. If done
well, 'blind' resume sending works quite well.
Also, I was very surprised in how long it took to get the replies to
come in. I didn't get practically any replies
(positive or negative) for about two months. During the next two
months, it was like an avalanche, and I wound
up having to drop a course due to all the interviews. Also, as a whole,
I recommend not applying to many governement
agencies. Most have a fixed pay scale way lower than the public sector
and it is not negotiable under any circumstances.
I remember one place, the Naval Research Laboratory wanted me to fly
from california to Washington, D.C. and
even give a speech for a maximum salary of under 2/3 of other offers I'd
gotten. I wan't just in it for the money, but
I did expected the salary to be competatitive.
One thing I noticed is that a funny thing happened. Usually companies
tries to get a feel of how your job search is going.
For one thing, they like it when you mention the salary rates you've
been offered. But, when I started pretending the
question was sincere and not most likely meant to perhaps save some on
their salary offer and went into entusiastic
details of the offers I got (I was always honest), the companies turned
out to get competitive with each other. Most of
the later interviews were basically me interviewing the company.
My resume package was 15 pages with the cover letter. However, I had
one page that ended with a prominant box
stating that the page (the one after the cover letter) concluded the
overview of my qualifications and what followed
was in depth details of my qualifictions for those that would be
interested in more detail.
The average human resource person reads a resume between 30 seconds and
a minute before deciding whether to
circulate the resume to hiring managers or throwing it into the circular
file (trash). However, when deciding who
to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to bring someone in for an
interview, the hiring manager wants the most
for their money (wouldn't you?)... Most managers can only bring in so
many people and the costs come from their
budget. I found that many people read every detail of my resume, which
included very detailed descriptions of
all my part time, summer jobs, internships, etc... going back to high
school and course descriptions related to
my double major. I remember mentioning that one of the managers
interviewing me asked about my trip and
I mentioned that I was vistiting several other companies on the trip and
a friend in Connecticut. The manager
actually asked if I was visiting a person I tutored in high school in
math (one of my references, but a minor one
at th end since it was a job back in high school). It wasn't, but I was
amazed that he had read my resume so well
that he knew where one of my 8 job references from a high school job was
in Connecticut.
HOWEVER... remember to make a very clear one page option as human
resources would practically never
get past a page after the cover letter.
Be sure to read books on interviewing, writing resumes, etc, and ask a
friend to mock-intereview you.
I spent $750 back in 1986 just on stamps, a large envelope and copying
the pages. A friend and I computerized
a lot of things like the general cover letter generator, and stuff like
using the university label printer to personalize
the cover letter, and the Return and To: addresses, all from one file,
seperated by one empty line (each company).
Anyway, allocate at least one month to write and fine tune the resume
and send it out (assuming putting 40 hours
a week into the work), don't expect replies to be in until 2-4 months
(there are some exceptions), and remember...
you've worked a long time very hard on getting the degree... the extra
work on really doing a first rate job on
your job preparation may very likely really pay off big time.
