The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 277 No 7411 p137-138
29 July 2006

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Career choices, working patterns and the future pharmacy workforce

In this second article in a series presenting data from a longitudinal cohort study about pharmacy careers, Sarah Willis, Phillip Shann and Karen Hassell discuss some key issues relating to the 2006 pharmacy graduate cohort's expected career choices and patterns of work

Sarah Caroline Willis, MA Econ, is research fellow, Phillip Shann, MSc, is research associate and Karen Hassell, PhD, is director of the Centre for Pharmacy Workforce Studies at the University of Manchester. Correspondence to: Ms Willis at Centre for Pharmacy Workforce Studies, School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL e-mail sarah.willis@manchester.ac.uk

Pharmacy students about to enter the profession will have a huge influence on the way pharmacy is practised in the future, and on the way in which services are delivered. Central to making accurate projections about future pharmacy practice and service delivery is an understanding of students’ expected job choice(s) within pharmacy — and even of intentions not to enter pharmacy practice — as well as an evaluation of students’ expected general pattern of work and whether students expect to have any career breaks.

As well as exploring an understanding of expected job choices, a longitudinal cohort study about pharmacy careers has been designed to explore the early career development of the 2006 pharmacy graduate cohort. We recognise that pharmacy careers in the future may be characterised as following a portfolio or “boundaryless” career¹ whereby job moves may not necessarily involve promotion, and pharmacy careers may consist more of a range of sequences of occupational experiences² — a trend similar to the pattern of employment of pharmacists who currently work as locums.³ Alternatively, the future careers of many pharmacy students may involve progression within one organisation over the course of their career, or across different organisations, gaining promotion through moving company.⁴

Through collecting data on expected pharmacy careers in the course of this study, we aim to determine which groups within the 2006 pharmacy graduate cohort intend to have a career with, for example, one of the large pharmacy employers, and which groups are more likely to intend to pursue an entrepreneurial career. These data on pharmacy practice intentions can then be contextualised in relation to variables such as gender and ethnicity, and we will be able to track whether — and how and when — some groups follow different career paths, take career breaks or have different working patterns.

Career choices

To determine the 2006 pharmacy graduate cohort’s career choices, they were surveyed in March 2005 when they were third year students. Students studying at 14 schools of pharmacy in Great Britain were asked about their motivations for studying pharmacy, about their future career plans, and about their preregistration intentions.

We achieved a 67 per cent response rate to the survey; 71.5 per cent of respondents were female and almost half (47.2 per cent) were from ethnic minority groups, with the single largest minority ethnic group being Indian British (19.2 per cent of the cohort). The following analysis is based on data relating to respondents’ career choices, their expected general pattern of work, and their intentions to take breaks over the course of their careers.

Career choices for 10 years’ time Looking at the cohort’s early career intentions (that is, where they saw themselves working in 10 years’ time) and level of career decidedness (that is, how certain of a choice they were) we found that the largest proportion of the cohort was “very certain” about a career in hospital pharmacy (Table 1).

Women were significantly more likely to be “very certain” that they wanted a hospital pharmacy career, indicating that this sector will continue to develop as a “gender niche”⁵ within the profession. Conversely, men were significantly more likely to have “very certain” entrepreneurial career intentions, with over one in six in the cohort “very certain” they would own their own community pharmacy — and this was strongly associated with ethnicity, with large proportions of white Irish, Pakistani, black African and Indian men expecting to follow entrepreneurial careers.

Career choices appeared to have been reinforced during the course of studying the MPharm for large proportions of respondents. Of those who had identified hospital pharmacy as their intended career path on entry to university, 48.3 per cent were “very certain” that they wanted a hospital pharmacy career in 10 years’ time and, of those who had intended to enter community pharmacy when they began their pharmacy degree, 69.3 per cent were “very certain” they wanted to work for a large multiple in 10 years’ time.

Working patterns

General patterns of work With a large proportion of female students in the cohort, it is perhaps not surprising that when asked about expected pattern of work over the course of their career, the most popular response from the sample was to “work full-time but with breaks for maternity leave” (22.6 per cent). This was followed by “work full-time early on then part-time later” (18 per cent) and “work full-time until retirement” (14.9 per cent).

This variable was statistically significant in relation to gender: of those who expected to work full-time until retirement, 64.1 per cent were male. Ethnic minority students were also found to be more likely to expect to work full-time until retirement and less likely to expect to have career breaks.

Exploring expected work patterns in terms of career choices for 10 years’ time, we found that those respondents who wanted an entrepreneurial career were also, proportionally, the largest group who expected to work full-time (either until retirement or who aimed to retire early), suggesting that respondents’ expectations about their practice patterns differed according to the type of pharmacy career path they expected to follow.

Career breaks To provide some indication about the size of potential exits from the pharmacy workforce, we asked the cohort about whether they expected to take a career break or breaks. Only 8.1 per cent of respondents said that they did not expect to have a career break during their career, and significantly different trends in the type of breaks expected emerged when the data were analysed in relation to gender (Table 2).

Differences between ethnic groups in relation to expected career breaks emerged during our analysis, with only 44.4 per cent of white Irish female students expecting to have a career break to start a family compared with 84.6 per cent of Bangladeshi female students. The implication of this finding is that the relative impact of career breaks to start a family on pharmacy workforce supply in the future is likely to be contingent upon the proportions of different ethnic groups in the workforce.

Overall, 19.6 per cent of the students surveyed wanted to have a career break to work abroad. This is a larger proportion than shown in Table 1 as being “very certain” that they will practise pharmacy abroad in 10 years’ time.

Looking at whether some sectors of the profession — identified as respondents’ career choice for practice in 10 years time — were more likely than others to be affected by career breaks, we found that those who were “very certain” that they wanted a career in hospital pharmacy were significantly more likely to expect to have a career break to work abroad, and those who were “very certain” that they wanted a career working for a large multiple community pharmacy were less likely to expect to have a career break to start a family. These results suggest that some careers were perhaps viewed as more compatible with geographical mobility (hospital pharmacy).

Practice implications

Our results suggest that the different sectors in the profession will continue to develop as gender niches, as women in the cohort were more likely to be “very certain” that they wanted a career in hospital pharmacy. Gender segregation in the workplace has been reported by other studies of graduate occupations,⁵ with a national longitudinal study of graduates finding that over 40 per cent of women worked in jobs exclusively or mainly done by women in their workplace, and over 50 per cent of men worked in jobs that were exclusively or mainly done by men.⁵ Purcell and Elias’s study⁵ argues that a gender niche arises because women in female-dominated work contexts find them to be comfortable places in which to develop careers. However, Hassell⁶ has demonstrated the existence of a glass ceiling in hospital pharmacy which prevents women being promoted to senior management posts, and this glass ceiling may have an effect on the kinds of career opportunities available for the 2006 cohort in the future.

If occupational segregation and, in particular, the sector of practice impact on female students’ ability to realise their early career expectations then it is possible that this will have a negative impact on their commitment to the profession, and may result in them leaving the workforce.

Other groups within the cohort may also find that they are unable to achieve their ambitions, such as the would-be entrepreneurs. Among them problems that arise when the practical realities of opening a pharmacy are encountered may mean that their entrepreneurial intentions do not come to fruition. Given the steady decline of independent pharmacies through competition from the multiples over recent years and an economic climate that does not favour the small pharmacy business, those who are unable to fulfil their entrepreneurial intentions may, once again, be unsatisfied by whatever alternative pharmacy career they choose, resulting in them finding alternative, non-pharmacy employment.

On the other hand, the level of would-be pharmacy owners in the cohort (around one in eight) is consistent with the findings of entrepreneurial spirit amongst graduates in general, with around one in seven surveyed graduates saying they will have set up their own business by the time they are 30 years old.⁷

In terms of the cohort’s career development, recent evidence suggests an increased trend towards flexible working among the existing workforce⁸ may be explained by pharmacists taking short-term contracts so that they can travel or study and this opportunity to follow a “boundaryless” career may prove to be especially popular among the future pharmacy workforce, since we found that most students in our study expected to take career breaks.

Finally, with many students intending to work abroad, pharmacy workforce shortages may not be resolved in the short term by increasing either the number of students or by opening new schools of pharmacy. The 13.6 per cent of the cohort who were “very certain” that they would be practising pharmacy abroad in 10 years’ time represents a large potential exit from the British workforce and an increase in the proportion of pharmacists on the Register of Pharmaceutical Chemists who are currently living or working abroad (9.5 per cent).⁹ Since the movement of pharmacists abroad has been shown to be related to the nature and sector of employment in the past¹⁰ our study will be able to provide data on whether future pharmacist moving abroad are part of a more general, historical trend, or whether new patterns in mobility are taking place in the context of an increasingly flexible and globalised pharmacy labour market.

Acknowledgments This study was commissioned and funded by the Pharmacy Practice Research Trust, an independent research charity set up by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain.

References

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