How to Offer the Best Onboarding – 4 Keys to Building Industry Understanding

Remember your first week?

A meeting with the regulatory team in your very first week at a pharmaceutical company. You’re new to the industry, but you have your university education to lean on. During the meeting, colleagues are talking about TPP, life cycle management, and batch release. You follow along to some extent, but feel like you’re missing the map that explains where all the roads lead.
That’s exactly how many new hires experience their first steps in the pharmaceutical or medical device industry.

Onboarding often focuses on the individual role and the company itself. The purpose is to get the new colleague up to speed quickly. But providing a bigger perspective of the different functions and the whole industry may be a challenge. Time and resources aren’t always available internally, and not all functions exist within every company. So how do we give new employees a sense of the whole: the industry, the chain from early research to finished product, and how colleagues in other functions contribute? How does it all fit together, and how can I, in my role, support for example marketing and supply functions when my own work lies within regulatory or medical? That’s not something a new colleague can be expected to figure out on their own.

In addition to role-specific training, onboarding also needs to provide industry understanding. That’s when we get a colleague who can grow and contribute in the long-term.

Four Keys to Industry Understanding

The four keys to industry understanding cover both your own field of work and the broader context. Only when you understand the whole picture – the language, the chain, the regulations, and the collaboration – does your contribution become truly valuable.

1. The language and the terms
Understanding your own area is important, but being able to follow discussions across functions makes collaboration much easier. For a newcomer, it can be the difference between nodding uncertainly or actually engaging in the discussion – whether it’s about study design, production flows, regulatory strategies, or marketing.

2. The chain from idea to patient
No matter where you work in the chain, your work becomes more meaningful when you see how it connects to the next step. For example: How does my work in pharmacovigilance contribute to patient safety? How can an adjustment in production affect the patients’ access? And how does communication with healthcare prorofessionals or patient organisations create value for the end-user of a drug or medical device?

3. Regulations and responsibilities
Even those not working hands-on with regulatory affairs need to understand the basics, since they shape the entire organization’s way of working and prioritizing. Another example is industry rules around pharmaceutical information, which influence not only marketers, but also those in research, clinical trials, and communications with patient organizations.

4. Collaborate to reach success
It’s easy to get stuck in your own area, but success more often comes when we understand how different roles interact. A clinician needs to understand the challenges of production, a marketing colleague needs to know the regulations, and a medical technology engineer needs to collaborate with colleagues in research and regulatory affairs. And who knows – the next career step might be in a function outside my current role?

Keeping colleagues engaged requires giving them opportunities to grow beyond their current role.

Nobody needs to know everything from the start

By giving new colleagues both the map and the directions, they gain a more secure start and become productive faster. More importantly, they gain the confidence to explore and grow in their roles, thus strengthening the organization’s ability to work and drive development together.

You don’t have to know everything from day one, but with the right introduction and training, you gain the keys to your own development and can succeed more quickly.
That’s where we at Läkemedelsakademin come in.

Courses for the early career – from Läkemedelsakademin

We know there’s a lot to take in at the start of a career. That’s why we’ve gathered courses that make it easier to understand both the bigger picture and your own role. Here you’ll find an overview of courses and training programs that can truly make a difference for new colleagues in Life Science.

Explore the overview of courses and training programs to start your career

Written by: Lena Mårtensson
Läkemedelsakademin