The Exciting Evolution in Early Discovery Careers

With growth, development, and values being key reasons for choosing a position, career paths are crossing disciplines and even industries

In the past, most people had career paths that were linear, a ladder where you started at the bottom and moved up a rung at a time to the next role, maybe moving across to another ladder if you wanted to be a manager. People often worked for the same organisation for their entire work life, following a single career path with job roles that were clearly defined at each rung of the ladder, and promotions that were based on time served and experience.

Of course, there were some people who moved from one career path to another, or who switched from one company to another to find different challenges and opportunities, but they were often considered mavericks or rebels.

Whilst many employees still follow linear career paths, the opportunities that a job offers for growth and development, as well as alignment of values between employees and employers, are now the key driving factors that people use for choosing positions, and roles are frequently becoming more bespoke. As such, linear career paths are more and more being replaced by paths that meander through different roles, disciplines and even industries, or roles that offer opportunities to work across areas and don’t fit the classic expectation of a person’s responsibilities in a particular job.

Within this group, we strongly believe in developing our staff and helping them to actively manage their careers, and as part of that development we provide opportunities to gain experience in different areas of the business and even across different job roles. Staff are regularly exposed to different areas of the business through presentations at all hands and divisional and local meetings. All of the current job vacancies are visible to everyone, and we make everyone aware of all available opportunities. These policies enable our staff members to identify new roles within the organisation where they can use their skills and knowledge in a different setting that fits with their career goals and can help us to retain those who might otherwise have found a new role elsewhere.

Not only do these opportunities help us to reduce attrition, a universal challenge among all companies, they also make us more competitive. Early Discovery research, once a sacred area for pharma, is now increasingly being conducted by CROs and other external partners. By remaining flexible and continually expanding career opportunities, we know that we will be able to hire and retain the most talented employees.    

As well as ensuring awareness of the different opportunities available to people and providing a comprehensive set of training resources, we also have a number of schemes within Early Discovery that help people to gain experience of the work done within different parts of the organisation:

• For those at the beginning of their career, we run an apprenticeship scheme in collaboration with the University of Kent. This is a three-year scheme where the apprentices work across different disciplines within Early Discovery to gain a foundation degree, with the option of continuing their studies to gain a full degree.
• We run a Graduate Rotation Scheme within Early Discovery, which is mainly intended for newly recruited fresh graduates, but which is also available to current staff. As with the apprenticeship scheme, the graduates will gain experience across multiple departments within ED.
• A further offering is our PhD internship Programme, which provides final year doctoral students with three months’ industrial experience across all our Early Discovery disciplines. This scheme helps students to understand what an industrial career would look like in each department, and we have recruited several participants into permanent positions.
• Staff can gain experience working in other areas of the business in a number of ways:
  • Our DMPK department offers a three-part experience that walks people through the theory of one of their assays followed by practical experience of running the assay, and then processing and interpreting the data.
  • Secondments are also available across departments, including both scientific and non-scientific areas of the business (e.g., client services, project management).
  • Many staff work on non-scientific projects, such as the introduction of a new technology into the business, which provides development in different areas to the scientific work.
• We also provide targeted training in particular areas. Our Specialist Knowledge Transfer Scheme enables the process of sharing expertise with future specialists, through which we have trained a number of chemists up to be CADD scientists, either full time or in joint chemistry-CADD roles.

In addition, we have a sabbatical program that gives employees the opportunity to develop new skills or improve their professional knowledge through providing time to take an external course or undertake formal research.

Within Early Discovery we have many people who have chosen to follow non-linear career paths inside the organisation, moving away from their original job roles and using their knowledge and skills in other areas of the business. Indeed, I have worked with several scientists who have chosen to transfer from their original role into different scientific disciplines, for example medicinal chemistry to biology, DMPK or CADD, and others who moved into non-scientific roles such as client services, project coordination, health and safety, business optimisation and IT business analysis. Moving into a new role provides opportunities to develop different skills that can then open up additional opportunities, and we have a recent example of a biologist who had transitioned into a project co-ordination role and has now moved into a position as an IT business analyst. We also have many other people who have used the opportunities within the organisation to develop skills in different areas, and either have roles that involve them working across different areas of the business or are trained in more than one discipline and can move between them, depending on the business and their development needs.

As for myself, I began my career at the organisation 16 years ago with BioFocus, which Charles River acquired in 2015. I started as a bench chemist but now have a role that spans science, cross-disciplinary management and informatics. Non-linear career paths are here to stay. They can take you to roles where you can continue to learn and grow into your ideal position and find career fulfilment.

Charles Baker-Glenn, DPhil, is an Associate Director in the Small Molecule Drug Discovery Division and manages the Computer-aided Drug Design (CADD) team within Early Discovery. He is a medicinal chemist by training.