Hope it didn't take you long to figure out the pharma rep gig is mostly game. It's a great first job for a kid but a deadend for anyone looking to be treated as an adult. Good luck in your future endeavors.
It took me about the last 3 years of my 8 in the industry to finally get up and get out of that mindless existance. Now I am back to selling and loving it and actually feel like my customers value me and what I bring to the table. Good luck.
Another question: Do you even want to be in the "keeper group"? With a job so depressing and debilitating, best to move on in 2012. Now is the time to plan for a new life.
Great advice here, unless you're marked by age and within sight of retirement eligibility. Then you want to manuver like hell as best you can to be a "keeper" since you'll not likely find a similarly lucrative job outside mutha, depressing, debilitating, and phony though she may be.
Look around and you can see "the keepers"... S3s, special project reps, sr exec reps, and most executives. Others (S1 or S2 wothout the right title) are probably in the pending layoff slots....its my uninformed take... but you dont need to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. Question is...can you move into the keeper group by 2012?
as another poster noted, do you really want to be kept?? seriously?? To continue on a road to nowhere, that no other industry respects or values? the drug rep job is pretty much dead...how could any even semi-intelligent person take this farce seriously?? The drug companies brought this mess upon themselves...corporate greed...corruption...
and what really brought Merck down was social engineering...
Never in my wildest dreams could I have foreseen Merck become an employer to avoid due to their bad management/human resource practices. Another great American tragedy that may have been preventable with better succession management, or successful management for that matter.
Kind of sad? When I was new a few decades ago I would introduce myself to physicians and pharmacists as their new Merck rep. Their eyes would lit up, smiled, and welcome me. Some would ask how did I beat that many candidates to join this well respected company. They said they may also use products by other companies but in their minds, Merck was the King of R&D and ethics.
