Careers are one of those things that we tend to enter into believing that we will stay in the same one for as long as we can. However, life has a way of throwing up some unexpected surprises for us now and then. When this happens, many of us have, or will, find ourselves faced with some difficult choices regarding our careers. Whether for personal or professional reasons, our current positions can become untenable.
Lots of people will simply move sideways and find themselves an equivalent position and role at another company in the same industry that they are currently working in. However, many people will also be looking to seize upon this as an opportunity to completely transform their lives and to move into a new career entirely.
Whatever the reason, when you are considering what career is best suited to you, you should give some thought as to whether a career as a pharmacy technician might be the best option. Many people who would be eminently suited for a career in pharmacy never think to pursue one because of their misapprehensions about what’s involved.
Let’s take a look at some of the most compelling reasons for any of us to pursue a career in pharmacy. Some of them might surprise you.
An Exciting Career Choice
Pharmacy is a discipline that calls upon a variety of other disciplines. Pharmacists must have a reasonable understanding of health, math, science, medicine, and technology. These all sound like relatively advanced subjects, and they are definitely the kind of subjects that we think of as being more academic.
A Variety of Skills
However, being a pharmacist doesn’t require the medical knowledge of a doctor, the scientific knowledge of a laboratory scientist, or the technical prowess of a computer programmer. A pharmacist needs to possess certain key skills and knowledge from all of these areas, but they are not expected to have to master all of them. You can learn more here about what a day in the life of a pharmacy technician entails.
What it does mean is that, in training to become a pharmacist, you will learn numerous new skills and take on board a fantastic amount of knowledge that you otherwise may never have come across. Careers that give us room for, and even encourage, our personal development are always going to be the most rewarding to take on.
Independence and Interaction
As a pharmacist, your roles will be balanced between those where you are required to work and solve problems on your own, and those where you are required to work with patients to help them establish the best course of treatment and action for their circumstances. If you are a people person, this is even more of a bonus as it means there will be no shortage of professional opportunities.
You also get the added bonus of knowing that the majority of interactions you have with patients are very important to them. Even if you’re only answering basic questions, you are putting their minds at ease and making the experience of undergoing medical treatment as stress-free as it can possibly be.
A Trusted Profession
Pharmacists are the kind of people that we all need to have in our lives, and yet whose importance is all too often overlooked and undervalued. Part of the reason for this is because it is the doctors and other medical professionals we see as doing most of the legwork. We still hold doctors in our society up on a pedestal for the unique and valuable work that they do for us.
From the perspective of patients and consumers, it appears as if pharmacists are simply looking at what the doctor has requested and then fulfilling that request. This betrays the many vital parts that pharmacists play in healthcare in the United States. But even if there are people who sadly see the work of the pharmacist as less important than that of the doctors, patients still need to have complete faith that their pharmacists are dispensing the right medication, and that they are capable of catching the rare mistakes that doctors make when prescribing treatments.
Room for Progression
The skills of pharmacists are required in a variety of different professional settings. These include community hospitals, community pharmacies, long-term care industries, and many more. This means that a skilled and qualified pharmacist has plenty of options for making a sideways transition into a similar but different job to the one they work now, or a move upwards to a more senior role in their specific field of expertise.
This is a major selling point for those who find themselves losing interest in jobs and careers relatively frequently. Those who know they have the option of making a hop, should they feel the need for a change in job, won’t have nearly as many logistical hurdles to overcome as those in careers that only admit a relatively narrow geographic of new members.
Excellent Earning Potential and Job Security
Over the last couple of years, 90% of those working in a pharmacy role reported earning over $100,000 a year! Of all the respondents to the survey who reported their salaries, 45.4% were earning somewhere between $120,000 and $140,000 annually. Pharmacists are in constant demand. They are important cogs in the healthcare machine during peace time, but where major conflicts and disasters break out, pharmacists can sometimes have an even more important role to play in distributing aid and ensuring that the available supplies are appropriately apportioned to those who need them.
If you find yourself in the position where you need to start looking for a new career, we strongly suggest that you consider working as a pharmacist. If you enjoy working with other people in order to make their lives a little bit better in some small but measurable way, being a pharmacist can help you to achieve this. You might need to do a little bit of extra training beforehand, but this will only add to the long-term value of your career choice.
