Pharmaceuticals Marketing?Promising Future Ahead

Posted by Vinod Saini on October 5th, 2015

India has always been at the forefront when it comes to pharmaceutical marketing education. Fortunately for the students, there are job opportunities aplenty waiting for them as well. As for the courses themselves, they can pick and choose from a plethora of PG level courses – MMS, PGDM, etc.

Understandably enough, the subject of pharmaceuticals marketing is taught more at the post-graduate level than at the under-graduate stage. Though admittedly there are a few UG level courses on this arena that surely is opening up immense career potential.

As per industry reports currently about 8,000 companies are producing well over 600 approved drugs thereby putting India among the top three Pharmaceuticals manufacturing nations in the world.

Institutes like IES are offering these Pharmaceuticals marketing courses that are recognized and approved by Government appointed bodies like National Board of Accreditation (NBA), University Grants Commission (UGC), and AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) with affordable fee structure. Candidates can do well to double check the validity of the courses that they are about to enroll. These Pharma marketing courses have a well thought out structure.

Most of these courses are for two years only.

Course structure and teaching methodology has improved a lot

Here is a closer look at how these courses are structured –

• Expectedly more emphasis is laid on topics like market positioning and brand building than on the ingredients and the science behind drugs and chemicals. Though, a basic understanding of the same is provided to the students in the beginning.
• Elaborating on the above, pedagogy is combined well with case studies and anecdotes.
• Role plays are held from time to time wherein the learners enact particular roles to bring out the significance of different situations and circumstances.
• Frequent industrial visits are arranged for the benefit of students to different pharmaceutical companies where they study, analyze and later prepare a report of their viewpoints of the same.
• Guest lectures are also held frequently on chosen topics and these are rendered by experts from the field of pharmaceuticals.
• Students are encouraged to work and perform in groups so that a team culture as well as leadership qualities could be cultivated.

You can see that lot of improvements have taken place in the course content, method of teaching, etc. But still there is lot that remains to be done.

There is an urgent need to set up more institutions to cater to the increasing need for students’ intake. Preferably, the big names in the industry need to come forward.