Not necessarily true. Experience matters in many of the high specialties. What you are confusing is tenure with experience. For instance most oncology companies will hire a rep with 3 years of oncology experience but only six overall years of pharma experience versus a PC rep with 10 years of PC experience. The problem is most PC/Big Pharma/Mass Market reps have tenure with very little experience outside of PC. It matters where you are at, and what you want to do. I never wanted to be a manager or home office person so I climbed the specialty ladder. I went from Big Pharma PC right out of college, did that for four years and then went to Amgen to sell GCSF during one of their expansions, which gave me access to calling on oncologists. I did that for three years, got my rolodex filled with oncology contacts and then went to Genentech. In a short amount of time my base salary went from $45K right out of college to $115K seven years later, and now at 39 I have a $140K base at a very attractive oncology biotech. And I have had the luck of hitting a few stock options/ESPP’s on the way at Amgen and Genentech.
It is how you want to play the game. I knew back in 1995 that mass market Big Pharma was a joke job and a dying business model. If you couldn’t figure out that having 5 reps in a POD selling the same drug to the same customer was a flawed idea than you deserve to be stuck in primary care mass market. I worked hard and had a plan to get to a specialty biotech. Too many of my peers stayed in big pharma never getting out of the PC/IM world and now they are stuck or laid off or are PC DM making 10% more than their reps with no upward mobility. If you are in your 30’s and are in PC/Mass Market you are stuck. I hate to say it but unless you have a good friend to bring you to their company you are almost un-hirable. For those of you in your 20’s there is still hope in this industry you just have to get out of the PC mentality, network yourself, and get to a small specialty biotech. Sure there are less of those jobs so only the connected and best will get there but it is there and it is no longer of a shot than jumping from PC to device or equipment because those folks don’t want you either.
