Hi Dani,
My name is Aniya and I’m a 4th year pharmacy student at Xavier University of Louisiana. I want to know if you could provide me with any tips on how to break into the world of IT pharmacy.
I have a sudden interest but I don’t know where to start.
Thanks!
Hi Aniya,
Congratulations…! You’re almost at the finish line and now is a great time to start thinking about which pharmacy career path you would like to pursue.
Quite honestly, there is/are no special tips I can offer you about getting into IT other than to just apply for positions as they come open.
What I will tell you though, is that you should be willing to think outside the box when you search job postings. One thing I did/do when looking for new positions is to not limit myself to searching for the standard “clinical pharmacist” or “consultant pharmacist” or plain “pharmacist” positions.
Doing so will only keep you in that standard pharmacist and you will just be competing with everyone else who isn’t willing to go a step further.
Do some keyword research… That’s right, you almost never hear that when you’re being taught how to do a job search. But you need to figure out what terms HR recruiters and IT hiring managers use to describe the people they are looking for, other than “pharmacist”, even though being a pharmacist is a requirement.
For instance, in the world of Epic, an Epic Willow Pharmacist position can also be titled “Epic Willow Analyst” and in the job description, you’d find a requirement for a Pharm.D. It would be very easy to miss such a posting if you didn’t know what job title to search for right?
Therefore, my tip for you would be to peruse the career section of various healthcare IT companies and see what job titles they use then take it from there. other good places to look are Indeed and even Craigslist! Just narrow your search down to the broader “healthcare IT” categories/sections and then start browsing.
I hope that helps…
Good luck and let me know how it goes!