Abstract
The Ministry of Health and Welfare proposed the "undergraduate program specializing in pharmaceutical industry" in 2013, as part of its roadmap to assist domestic pharmaceutical companies to become the top-tier pharma companies in near future and provide skilled personnel tailored for pharmaceutical industry. However, it is not clear whether this "undergraduate program" meets the needs of pharmaceutical industry, especially when the number of pharmacy students increased from 1,200 to 1,700 per year since 2009. The purpose of this paper is to identify which educational background is preferred by pharmaceutical companies, by surveying the CEOs of domestic pharmaceutical companies and referring to recruitment advertisements shown in medical newspapers, specified by the fields within the companies. Two independent reviewers referred to recruitment session in Yakup newspaper and Dailypharm from May 2012 until January 2014, focusing on recruitments from pharmaceutical companies targeting bachelors' degree holders with no prior experience. 749 recruitments were observed during the study period, more than 90% of which were provided by domestic pharmaceutical companies, and regardless of the companies being domestic or multinational, pharmaceutical companies' preference for pharmacists was remarkable (44.3% for domestic and 65.8% for multinational), and the preference was especially high in the fields such as Medical, R&D, Market Access (regulatory affair/pricing and reimbursement), Business Development, and Marketing. Survey results showed that the need of establishing the undergraduate program specializing in pharmaceutical industry is mixed, suggesting that although there is need for the educating personnel targeting pharmaceutical industry, the undergraduate program would not be an answer due to current PEET system. Our study concludes that in the example of pharmaceutical companies' recruitments shown in medical newspapers, pharmaceutical companies prefer pharmacy major in almost all fields of the pharmaceutical companies, yet the pharmaceutical companies still perceive the gap between current bachelor's degree holders(including pharmacy majors) and the ideal personnel required for advancing to the "top-class" pharmaceutical companies.
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