What are MedComms agencies actually like?

‘MedComms’ is a catch-all term for a large but somewhat hidden industry.

Within that industry are a vast spectrum of very different agencies – some are huge, some are tiny, some are focused on a very specific niche, some will work on anything you throw at them as long as it’s healthcare-related, some are virtual, some have offices, some are only to be found in London, and some have offices in every country that you could name if you were given 30 seconds and an atlas.

If you are new to MedComms, how do you know what would suit you? And how do you know if the company you are interviewing with is going to offer you what you are looking for?

It’s not even that straightforward if you’ve been working in MedComms for a while.

If you’ve only worked in one or two agencies, how do you know if the grass is really greener elsewhere, or if you’re already working in the best place for you? That’s where I come in.

I’m Eleanor Steele and I’m the MedComms Mentor.

I’ve been working in MedComms since 2004, and in that time I’ve worked for big networks, tiny boutique start-ups and all sorts in between, and since I went freelance in 2018, I’ve worked with an even broader range of different clients.

In this video, I’m looking at six features of MedComms agencies that I think you should consider when you are applying for jobs and maybe when you’re thinking about applying for your next move.

Obviously, in a short video like this, I can’t cover every single nuance and none of the things that I cover are absolutely black and white.

Every agency does things in its own way, so my observations are about how likely things are going to be in certain types of agencies rather than how they absolutely are in every agency that comes into that category.

The thing I’m trying to do is help you come up with the questions you can ask yourself to help you work out what would suit you best, and then the questions that you can ask in an interview to see whether the agency is going to be a good fit for you.

So let’s get started.

The majority of MedComms agencies are part of a network.

This can be small – a few sister agencies operating as conflict management brands. Because once an agency has reached maybe 30 or 40 people, it will often split up into discrete companies. That way they can take on clients in the same therapy area without it causing a conflict of interest.

Also, it’s easier to manage people in smaller self-sufficient units rather than keeping everyone together in one large amorphous group, although there are different ways to do this separation. Sometimes it’s by location, sometimes it’s by creating new brands, sometimes it’s simply by fire-walling teams within the same overall company.

These are sort of mini-networks.

The other kind of network is anything but mini. They are huge, multinational companies, and there are often multiple agencies doing similar MedComms work, or taking similar but slightly different angles on MedComms-related business.

There may also be multiple agencies that deal with more traditional advertising work outside of healthcare, and then other agencies or other types of company that do totally unrelated things as well.

Bringing it back to the MedComms agencies, if they’re part of a network, they are often well established and have been operating for a long time. They’re likely to have defined processes and procedures for the projects that they do, and they may well have large accounts working with clients who’ve been on the books for years.

And while every agency has to do a certain amount of business development to keep going, this may be handled by a dedicated business development department, rather than being something that would be touched by everybody within the company.

They’re also quite likely to have fairly rigidly defined roles and responsibilities, and may even have a very structured career pathway mapped out for each role within the company.

If you are new to MedComms, networks are also quite likely to have established training programmes. In my experience, companies with training programmes are likely to start out with one targeted at new starters, so people completely fresh into MedComms. But there are several companies out there that I know of who have structured training programmes for more senior team members too.

And because big agencies are, well, big, they also have more vacancies to recruit for, so you may be part of a big cohort coming in, basically giving you an instant friendship group.

On the other hand, big agencies make a big noise when they’re recruiting, so there may be an awful lot of other people applying for that cohort, so it might be hard to stand out from the crowd and actually get a place.

So, are you the kind of person who likes that type of structure? Would it suit you to have a career path mapped out so that you can go through and tick things off as you aim for the next rung in the ladder?

Now, there are definitely networks out there that have a more squiggly approach to career development, and opportunities for you to work in different ways on different things, but a company’s approach to training and career development, and their approach to flexibility or accessing different opportunities is definitely something to ask about in an interview.

And now let’s consider a different kind of company structure.

Most MedComms agencies begin life as independent start-ups and are owned by their founders.

Basically, someone or a group of like-minded friends, found a new baby agency and build that company, often using a fair amount of freelancer support to get things going, and recruiting people that they’ve worked with in previous jobs so that they can get the new agency off the ground. Founders often intend to sell their agency to a large network in the long-run, but that’s often quite a long-term plan.

So these independent agencies are likely to be newer than network agencies, and that can mean they may be more flexible than networks in terms of job crafting and autonomy, and progression opportunities.

In some cases, that’s a genuine strategic decision to allow people to build the role that’s right for them, and take part in growing the company and its culture and as a way to support team members to bring their whole self to work.

Sometimes it’s more of a case of all hands on deck – everyone has to muck in and wear multiple hats just to get the job done.

This can be a fantastic way of learning and if you are the kind of person who just wants to get stuck in and doesn’t mind that there isn’t much of a plan for exactly what you’ll be learning, it could be great for you. You will definitely learn a lot, and you’ll probably be exposed to a greater breadth of things than if you were in a more structured programme.

Smaller agencies also mean that you are more likely to be working with very senior people in the company. There are fewer layers, so you might be working directly with the owner or managing director, or at least people within the leadership team.

And in a big agency or a big network, you are unlikely to have this kind of senior face-time, and you’ll probably never meet the owner or leadership team of the whole network, so this can be a real selling point of working in a smaller agency.

Independent agencies are also less likely to have established training programmes or actually even any kind of structured training at all. To have a graduate intake programme, you need to have an intake, and small agencies may not have the capacity to bring on more than one new starter at a time.

That doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t have learning opportunities, obviously, but it may or be more focused on one-to-one mentoring or on the job training with your line manager.

So would this kind of atmosphere suit you? Are you the kind of person who wants to jump in and get their hands dirty with whatever’s going on?

If so, a smaller independent agency might be the kind of place for you.

MedComms is an international business, so as agencies based in one location grow, they often hire staff in other key locations such as the UK, US and Switzerland, places where they’re likely to have clients.

Agencies also like having offices in different locations so that they can tap into populations that are likely to have lots of potential recruits.

In the UK, MedComms agencies are definitely more widespread than they used to be, but there are real clusters in places like Oxford and Cambridge, Manchester and Macclesfield, Glasgow, the South Coast, the Thames Valley, and obviously London.

In the US there are also hubs around New Jersey, Boston and California – all places with multiple pharma company offices and universities with strong scientific credentials.

Large networks may have affiliate offices in many locations across the world, and these might work on local MedComms projects and help out the global offices when they’re needed, or they might be more focused on other types of work.

When MedComms agencies have international offices, people working on the same team might be based in multiple locations rather than only working with people in the same office. This has always been the case to a certain extent, but I think it’s become even more common since the pandemic, as some agencies that were working in quite an office – or at least location-based way – got used to working in a more disparate and virtual way.

Nowadays, I think that MedComms teams that all sit together in the same office are definitely in the minority.

Having international team members can be really useful because you can extend the working day, allowing teams to pass work onto the next time zone to maximise efficiency, which can be a real life-saver when you’re working to tight deadlines.

It can be tricky though. If you’re working five hours ahead of your line manager and you’re completely stuck on something until they get online, you are completely stuck.

It can also mean that a particular slot in everyone’s calendar is always crammed with meetings, because you’re trying to coordinate everything into the few overlapping hours each day.

That can get really tricky if you throw in clients in a different time zone again – someone’s going to be getting up early or logging off late to make it all fit in.

On the other hand, international companies may offer opportunities for secondments or roles abroad, which might be very appealing. I know a lot of people in MedComms who have spent a year or two on the opposite side of the Atlantic from where they grew up, and there are also definitely plenty of jobs in lots of exciting places like Australia for people who have a few years of MedComms experience under their belts.

Nowadays, it’s fairly standard to say that remote working is a possibility for a job, but MedComms has always had a high proportion of remote workers. We were working from home before it was cool.

I had my first remote medical writing job within an agency in 2011 and had previously been working from home ad hoc if I needed to before that without it being an issue.

So it’s fairly likely that if you are working from an agency that does have offices, there will be some remote working in any MedComms role, if that’s what you are looking for.

But some agencies have taken this one step further. There are now several fully virtual MedComms agencies out there. Everyone works from home, there’s no office – that’s just not how they roll.

I’ve worked with a couple of these, and they do get together in person when they need to, so they’ll have company meetings altogether, or would hire a meeting room for the day if they need a team to get together to work on a pitch or something.

They might encourage people to go for a coffee or have annual review meetings over lunch with their line manager, and they pay a lot of attention to how they interact within their virtual environment too.

That being said, being fully remote doesn’t suit everyone, so knowing whether you would thrive in that kind of environment is important.

Also, it can be hard to learn the ropes in a new industry without significant in-person support, even if this is something you’d find perfect later in your career when you know what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis.

Another factor of virtual agencies is that although they aren’t tied to an office, they will usually only be able to hire people in the country they’re based in for legal and tax reasons.

If you are new to MedComms, you have a lot to learn no matter what your background. A new intake training scheme can be a great place to start, but they’re not all the same.

Some are focused on a specific role – medical writing, account management – which is great if you’re already certain about what you want to do.

Others introduce you to the spectrum of roles across that company and work with you to find what is going to suit you best.

Some are a short immersion into training with lots of sessions and practice tasks packed into a couple of weeks before you get released into the wild on your new teams.

Some are a few months long, giving you a mix of training sessions and activities that you have to balance with the client work you’ll start taking on from day one.

Some have rotations where you’ll be working within a specific team or doing a specific type of role before you switch onto something totally different after a couple of months.

Some guarantee promotion after you ‘graduate’ and some don’t.

Some are based in a specific location, some are hybrid and some are fully remote.

Some have a large cohort, some are only a couple of people at a time.

Some are run every quarter, some only run when a company can justify it from a business perspective, and that might only be every three or four years.

Some have a very intense recruitment process with lots of steps and hoops to jump through, and others just want you to fill in a form and come to an interview.

Thinking about the kind of structure that would suit you, and the way that you learn best will help you find the schemes that you should focus on.

There are also agencies without specific schemes. Some of those won’t recruit people who don’t have any MedComms experience – it takes a massive investment of time from busy existing team members whenever a company brings in somebody who is totally new to the industry. Some companies don’t have the capacity to do that, so they focus on bringing in people who already know what they’re doing.

Other agencies won’t have a specific scheme, but they do still recruit people who are new to MedComms. They may not have that structured approach, but they’ll still support new starters, usually with more of an on-the-job training approach via your line manager or team leader, and that can be a great way to make it more tailored and focused to your needs.

Knowing the kind of approach that would suit you, will help you narrow down where to apply.

MedComms can mean an awful lot of things. There are a lot of agencies out there that describe themselves as ‘full service’ though they each may define this slightly differently. And they may mean that there’s an agency within their network that can do almost any type of work, so they can totally sort out that niche project that a client wants to do, even if it won’t be their usual team that would technically be doing the work.

I looked at some of the broad types of work that MedComms agencies do in my previous video, and there’s a link in the description below, but that only scratched the surface.

Some agencies specialise in specific types of work, often digital projects, Continuing Medical Education or ‘CME’ or educational events – things that all count as MedComms.

There are other types of agency that might call themselves MedComms, that do healthcare-related projects, maybe focusing on strategy or insight gathering rather than the communications projects that might be devised in response to that strategy or insight.

Maybe they focus on regulatory writing, so the documents for submission to regulatory authorities so that a drug can be authorised for use in patients, rather than communications to broader healthcare audiences.

There are also agencies that work solely in the promotional space within healthcare, and all of these agencies are sort of neighbours to MedComms and sometimes we all get lumped in together.

Coming back to traditional MedComms, most agencies will work on any therapy area and any drug.

This is one of the things that I’ve always loved about working in MedComms. You can hop between disease areas and there’s always something new to learn.

There are a few agencies that specialise in particular therapy areas, often in oncology or rare diseases. These agencies are most often part of a network and would have sister agencies that would work on other areas or maybe everything.

If you are just getting started in MedComms, I would recommend working in an agency that works across any therapy area and any project, because you won’t know what you really enjoy until you’ve tried a few things. And believe me, there are surprises all over the place of MedComms.

I do get a lot of questions from people about finding a job that would involve working on one particular therapy area, and I kind of feel that misses the point of working in MedComms, especially for people who are new to the industry.

I completely understand that it can feel overwhelming to consider working on anything, but in practice it isn’t massively overwhelming and you are always supported by your team. We all get used to it with practice.

But if you are utterly focused on one therapy area, it’s quite unlikely that you will find a whole agency focusing on that particular therapy area unless it’s oncology or rare diseases, which let’s face it, are both massive assortments of tiny therapy areas in their own right.

And the same goes for projects.

Getting broad experience early on will mean that you’ll be in a better position to specialise later if that’s what you really want to do. But it also means that you don’t box yourself into a corner and struggle to find a job in a broader agency later on.

So what kind of agency do you think would suit you?

Whenever you’re considering a new job, think about: 

1. Whether they are part of a network
2. Or an independent company
3. If they have an international team
4. Or even if they have an office at all
5. If they have a new intake training scheme and maybe schemes for more senior people too
6. Or if they specialise in particular types of work

Which of these aspects would suit you or not suit you?

Which are obvious from the agency’s website or LinkedIn page? Which do you need to ask about during an interview, and what answer would you want them to give if you do ask the question?

You can download a free PDF summary of everything that I’ve covered from a link in the video description below, and you can use that to really think about what would suit you and to help you apply for jobs or prepare for interviews.

 Being prepared means you are more likely to find the right role in the right company for you. But if you are still struggling with what the right role for you might be, you can watch my previous videos looking at the skills, experience, and mindset, you need to be a Medical Writer, a Medical Editor, or a Client Services person in MedComms.

And do let me know in the comments if you have any questions on any of this or if you have any suggestions for other topics you’d like me to cover in future videos.

And if this has been helpful, please do hit the like button and share it with any friends who are interested in the wonderful world of MedComms.