Overview of COVID-19 impact on job roles in pharmaceutical and chemical industries

The pharmaceutical and chemical industries experienced a massive impact of COVID-19. Development of new medical treatments like vaccines and drugs, working towards drug approvals, and pressure to innovate caused the surge of job roles in IT, R&D, sales, and marketing. But that’s just the tip of an iceberg. Additional factors like digitalization and telemedicine have significantly changed the future of the workforce in these industries.

The period included the time from January 2018 to December 2021.

In this post, you’ll find a brief overview of our findings. For more insights, download a full report by the link.

Demand for IT jobs and expertise in cutting-edge technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence surged. Leaders opening the biggest number of IT-related vacancies include Merck, Novartis, and Roche. You can see this trend in the graph below:

The top-ten job roles that grew over the studied period are as follows (growth percentage is specified next to each job role):

The share of future-oriented IT skills (like data analytics and data science) in job postings increased significantly. We associate the demand for future-oriented skills with challenges imposed by the recent pandemics. For example, pharmaceutical and chemical companies are forced to use more IT resources and data analytics for research and analysis.

Several factors contribute to a surge of IT jobs and skills in the pharma and chemical industries. First, it’s the rise of telemedicine for diagnostics, disease screening, and consultation. Second, the adoption of sophisticated technologies like machine learning and Big Data for purposes like clinical trials and medical device testing requires specialists with narrow expertise. Finally, the trend of wellness and wearables (heart rate sensors, oximeters, vitamin trackers, etc.) pushes companies to invest in technologies that collect the data, process it, and present actionable insights based on that data.

The increase in chronic diseases, a prevailing pay-for-performance pattern, and trends in preventive healthcare force pharma companies to redefine themselves and find new effective marketing and sales channels. Lately, pharma companies have been stepping back from traditional sales chains involving middlemen (like drug stores) between them and an end-consumer. Today, pharma players educate their customers and humanize their brands to gain a positive reputation and establish trustful relations.

As we can see, pharmaceutical companies are coming back to the normal, pre-COVID state. The number of job postings has been steadily increasing. Bayer, J&J, and Bristol-Myers-Squibb are leaders in hiring commercial roles.

Additionally, there’s a steady demand for customer care managers, pharmaceutical marketing specialists, and customer experience managers. Because customer support has become an integral part of self-service and satisfactory customer experience, these job roles are in demand as never before.

After we’ve analyzed the future orientation of commercial job roles, we figured that this field is less future-oriented than IT roles. Supposedly, this trend is caused by a lower share of digital skills even though commercial roles gain traction in digitalization like omnichannel marketing and e-commerce.

A recent report by Oxford Economics published in 2020 reveals that the pharmaceutical industry took fourth place among R&D-intensive sectors with a 14.2% intensity rate. It’s not surprising due to the immense research, testing, and development work done throughout this period.

Here’s the round-up of the most popular R&D jobs and their percentage growth:

Looking at this chart, we can see a vivid rise in demand for CRO and automation roles in the R&D field along with traditional job roles like biologists and technicians. Companies didn’t stop outsourcing the R&D roles, though.

Like with R&D jobs, the rise of CRO jobs is caused by the recent increasing load on the pharmaceutical industry, like vaccines against COVID-19 and its strains.