If You Work in Public Health, Pharma Might Be Closer Than You Think

Over the past year, I’ve spoken to more people from the public sector who are considering pharmaceutical careers than at any other point in my career, and it isn’t difficult to understand why.

The public health landscape in the US has been through enormous disruption. Under the Trump administration, federal health agencies have faced workforce reductions, restructures, funding uncertainty and major changes in how the US engages with the global health system. For people who built careers at organisations such as the CDC, NIH, HHS, state and local health departments, government contractors, universities and NGOs, this isn’t an abstract political debate. It has very real implications for their careers.

Many people who expected to spend another ten or twenty years in public service are now having to think seriously about what comes next.

Increasingly, I think pharma should be part of that conversation.

The problem is that many people working in public health have no idea how relevant their experience could be to the pharmaceutical industry.

You Probably Have More Pharma-Relevant Experience Than You Think

A few months ago, I spoke with Rachel Salomonsen about her journey from public health and epidemiology into pharma. Something she said has stayed with me.

When she started exploring industry roles, she realised that she wasn’t necessarily missing the skills pharma wanted. She was missing the language to describe them.

I've seen exactly the same thing with other people I've spoken to from public health. They tell me they worked on disease surveillance, evaluated public health interventions, advised government stakeholders on vaccination programmes or coordinated responses involving multiple organisations.

Those descriptions make complete sense in the public sector. In pharma, however, the same experience might connect to real-world evidence, epidemiology, outcomes research, evidence strategy, external stakeholder engagement, scientific communications or cross-functional leadership.

The experience hasn't suddenly become more valuable because we've given it a different name. The problem is that industries develop their own language, and hiring managers tend to evaluate candidates through that language.

That distinction matters enormously when you're trying to change sectors.

Public Health Teaches You Something Pharma Needs

There is another reason I think people from the public sector can be incredibly valuable in pharma: public health teaches you how to solve messy problems.

Real populations don't behave like clinical trials. Healthcare systems are complicated, data are imperfect, stakeholders disagree, resources are limited and priorities change. Sometimes you have to make recommendations before you have every piece of information you would ideally want.

Working in that environment develops skills that are surprisingly difficult to teach. You learn how to look at incomplete evidence and work out what it actually means. You work with epidemiologists, statisticians, clinicians, policymakers, communications teams, government officials and community organisations, often without having direct authority over any of them.

You also learn how to translate complex science for very different audiences and how to operate within large organisations where decisions rarely sit neatly within one function.

None of those capabilities belongs exclusively to the public sector. They are also scientific leadership, stakeholder management, communication and strategic decision-making skills, and pharmaceutical companies need people who can do them well.

So Where Could Someone From CDC or Public Health Actually Work in Pharma?

This is where people often get stuck. They search LinkedIn for "public health" jobs at pharmaceutical companies and don't find very much. They then assume there isn't a place for them.

The problem is usually the search rather than the experience.

Instead of searching for your current professional identity, start looking for the problems you're qualified to solve.

For epidemiologists, the obvious areas include epidemiology, Real-World Evidence (RWE), Real-World Data (RWD), HEOR, evidence generation, clinical development and, depending on the background, drug safety.

Someone with deep infectious disease or vaccine experience could potentially look at vaccines, infectious disease Medical Affairs, clinical development, epidemiology, RWE or scientific communications. People who have worked extensively with government agencies, policy and healthcare systems may find relevant opportunities in Government Affairs, Public Policy, Market Access, External Affairs and Global Health.

There are also people across the public sector whose careers have involved interpreting and communicating scientific evidence. Depending on their experience and qualifications, Medical Affairs, Scientific Communications, Medical Information, Publications and Medical Education may all be worth understanding.

Programme leaders shouldn't necessarily assume they need a scientific job title either. Large public health programmes require operations, stakeholder management, prioritisation, strategy and cross-functional leadership, all of which exist within pharmaceutical organisations too.

The list is much broader than most people initially realise.

A more useful question than "Which pharma job matches my current title?" is: Where does the pharmaceutical industry need people to solve the kinds of problems I already know how to solve?

Transferable Skills Don't Transfer Themselves

This is probably the biggest misconception I see among experienced professionals trying to pivot.

They assume recruiters will connect the dots for them.

Usually, they won't.

You can have fifteen years of exceptional experience, have advised governments, managed major programmes, led surveillance initiatives covering millions of people or become the person everyone calls when something goes wrong. But if your CV reads like a federal job description, someone recruiting for a pharmaceutical company may struggle to understand why any of that makes you a candidate for their role.

That doesn't mean the experience isn't relevant. It means the connection hasn't been made clearly enough.

And translation involves much more than replacing a few words on your CV with pharma terminology.

You Need to Understand the Industry You're Trying to Enter

Before applying for dozens of roles, spend some time learning how the pharmaceutical industry actually works.

Understand the drug development lifecycle and what happens before and after approval. Learn what Medical Affairs does and how it differs from Clinical Development. Understand where RWE and HEOR sit, and the differences between Medical, Commercial, Market Access, Regulatory and other major functions.

You don't need to become an expert in every function. You need enough industry literacy to recognise where your experience intersects with the problems these teams are trying to solve.

Once you understand that, your own career can start looking quite different.

A disease surveillance programme may contain experience relevant to epidemiology and evidence generation. Advising external committees may demonstrate stakeholder engagement and influence. Programme evaluation may overlap with outcomes research. Presenting scientific recommendations to senior government officials demonstrates an ability to synthesise complex information and communicate it to senior decision-makers.

Even emergency response experience can tell an interesting story about prioritisation, cross-functional leadership and decision-making under considerable ambiguity.

Same experience, but framed in a way that someone outside your sector can understand.

Don't Throw Away Your Subject-Matter Expertise

One mistake I wouldn't make is trying to reinvent yourself completely.

If you have spent twelve years working in vaccines, infectious diseases, oncology, maternal health, rare diseases or another specific area, that knowledge has value. Look at the pipelines of pharmaceutical and biotech companies and find out who is developing medicines in areas you already understand deeply.

Think about the disease knowledge you've accumulated, but also your understanding of the patient population, healthcare system, policy environment and evidence landscape. Depending on the role, those things can differentiate you from someone who understands pharma but has much less depth in the disease area.

Your first industry role doesn't need to represent your entire future career. It needs to create a credible bridge between the career you've already built and the industry you want to enter.

Once you're inside and understand how the industry operates, the range of roles available to you may become considerably broader.

Your Network Needs Translating Too

I also wouldn't spend six months submitting hundreds of applications online and hoping someone eventually spots the potential in your background.

Find people who have already made the move from the CDC, NIH, academia, public health, government or NGOs into industry and ask them about it. What surprised them? Which parts of their previous experience turned out to be useful? What did they misunderstand about pharma when they were on the outside?

More importantly, talk to people who are actually doing the jobs you're considering. Job descriptions are often terrible at explaining what a role looks like day to day, particularly when you're reading them from outside the industry.

A twenty-minute conversation with someone working in RWE, Medical Affairs, HEOR or Clinical Development can sometimes teach you more than reading fifty job descriptions. It can also help you work out fairly quickly whether the job you thought sounded perfect is something you'd actually enjoy.

Public Service Experience Isn't a Career Liability

I think this is worth saying because I've spoken to people recently who sound almost apologetic about their backgrounds, as though spending a career in government means they are somehow behind people who chose industry earlier.

I don't see it that way.

Public health organisations have trained thousands of people to understand disease at population level, interrogate enormous datasets, communicate risk, evaluate evidence, work across healthcare systems and make difficult decisions affecting patients and communities.

Those capabilities don't disappear because the organisation you developed them in is restructuring, and they don't become less valuable because your career didn't start in pharma.

What does change is the context. An industry employer needs to understand how those capabilities help solve their problems, and it is your job as a candidate to make that connection clear.

Pharma Isn't Public Health

There is another side to this conversation that I think sometimes gets glossed over.

Pharma isn't simply public health with better funding and different job titles. It's an industry. Pharmaceutical companies develop medicines that can transform people's lives, but they are also businesses.

Priorities change. Portfolios change. Programmes get discontinued. Companies restructure and people get laid off. Scientific decisions also sit alongside regulatory requirements, payer needs, competitive considerations, development timelines and commercial realities.

For someone who has spent most of their career in an organisation whose primary mission is population health, that can require a genuine mindset shift.

For some people, that environment will be exciting. For others, it won't be the right fit, and that's completely reasonable.

But I would make that decision after understanding the industry rather than ruling yourself out because you assumed someone with your background couldn't work there.

I Think We're Going to See More People Make This Move

The current disruption in public health may accelerate the movement of people into industry, but I don't think that's the only reason this transition makes sense.

Healthcare is increasingly asking people to operate across disciplines. Pharma is working with enormous real-world datasets. AI is changing how evidence is generated and analysed. Clinical development is becoming more data-driven, and companies are trying to understand what happens to patients outside traditional clinical trials.

At the same time, Medical Affairs and other scientific functions have to communicate increasingly complicated evidence to clinicians, regulators, payers, policymakers and patients.

A lot of people working in public health have spent their careers at exactly those intersections.

It brings me back to my conversation with Rachel. What struck me about her transition wasn't simply that she'd successfully moved from public health into pharma. It was that the capabilities that eventually made her successful in industry had been developing throughout her career.

She knew how to solve problems, bring different stakeholders together, work with evidence and create value. Pharma simply gave her a different environment in which to use those skills.

So, for people looking at the uncertainty across public health right now and wondering whether moving into industry means starting their careers again, I don't think it does.

You will probably need to reposition yourself. You'll need to learn a new industry and its language, understand which roles genuinely fit your experience, build a different network and get much better at explaining the relevance of work that may seem obvious to you but won't necessarily be obvious to a pharma hiring manager.

You may also find that your first industry role doesn't come with exactly the title or seniority you expected.

But you're not starting from zero. You're bringing the career you've already built with you.

The challenge is making sure pharma understands its value.

If You're Considering the Move

This is actually one of the reasons I created The Pharma Pivot Program.

I kept seeing experienced people with strong scientific, healthcare, academic and public-sector backgrounds struggling with the same problem. They knew they wanted to explore pharma, but they didn't know where they fitted or how to position years of experience in a way that made sense to an industry hiring manager.

The program is designed to help with that transition: understanding how the industry works, identifying the roles that genuinely make sense for your background, translating your transferable skills into pharma language, and building a CV, LinkedIn profile, networking strategy and job search around that positioning.

It's not about turning your public health career into something it wasn't or stuffing your CV with industry buzzwords. It's about understanding the value of what you've already done and learning how to communicate it in a completely different employment market.

If you're coming from the CDC, government, public health, epidemiology, academia, an NGO or another adjacent sector and you're looking at pharma thinking, I know I could do this, but I have no idea where I fit, that's exactly the gap The Pharma Pivot Program is intended to help bridge.