What is the medical writing career pathway?

What is the medical writing career pathway? Being a Medical Writer is a fantastic career full of variety and opportunities.

I should know – I’m Eleanor Steele and I’m the MedComms Mentor, and I first became a Medical Writer back in 2004, and today I want to take you through your potential career as a Medical Writer, because it’s not just a static job.

I’m going to look at each role in the typical medical writing career path in turn, and we’ll examine what the core focus of that role is, how they interact with other team members and stakeholders, and also what kind of work they’re likely to do on a day-to-day basis.

Obviously this is just a sketch of the typical career path, and different agencies do things differently. They may have their own names for each of these roles, there may be more levels or even a flatter structure. There might be hybrid options, including client services work, or editorial responsibilities. There could be opportunities to specialise in particular aspects of these roles, or you might have the flexibility to craft your own role based on your strengths and interests along with the business need in your agency.

MedComms is varied and evolving, so I can’t pin down every aspect. Instead, I want to show you what a typical path could look like, so you can think about how you want your career to progress, and I want to help you think of questions you can ask – maybe in a job interview, maybe when you’re talking to your line manager about promotion or development opportunities.

Remember, a career path doesn’t need to be linear, and you don’t have to follow the expected route. I’ve talked previously about my Squiggly Career, and there’s a link to a video about this in the description below.

This linear progression that I’m talking about here is an easy way to summarise what’s possible, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only way for your career to progress.

Considering how you work, the kind of agency that would suit you and the type of projects that you would find most rewarding to work on, can all help you find work that will suit you best at any stage in your career.

This is just the starting point, so let’s get into the first role.

1. Associate Medical Writer

If you’re new to medical writing, you need a lot of training no matter what your background. MedComms, and medical writing is different.

Yes, there are transferable skills that you may have picked up during your studies or previous work experience, but knowing how to apply them in MedComms takes some getting used to.

It also takes time to get your head around the types of projects we work on, plus the specific account that you’re assigned to. Which therapy area is it? Which drug? What’s its mechanism of action? Which healthcare professionals are you communicating with? What are the patient’s current unmet needs? What sort of data are you dealing with, and what are the competitors for your drug like?

This is all on top of the fact that it might be your very first proper job, which has its own set of things to get used to.

That being said, most agencies understand that this process isn’t easy. We’ve all been through it after all. That’s why your first medical writing role is often called ‘Associate Medical Writer’ rather than ‘Medical Writer’.

There’s an acknowledgement that you have a lot to learn, that you’ll probably need more time than is in the budget to complete tasks, and you’ll need more support to get those tasks done than a fully-fledged Medical Writer would.

That support might be given in different ways. You might go through a structured training programme, or be trained on-the-job.

I’ve talked about the differences between these approaches and actually between different types of training programme, in my video exploring the different types of agency.

But whatever type of system you go through, you’ll definitely work closely with more experienced colleagues to learn the ropes.

Obviously, you’ll be given a line manager, but a lot of companies will also assign a mentor or buddy to help you through the first few months. Someone who’s a couple of years ahead of you, someone you can go to with all those silly questions without feeling like a numpty.

You might also be working with other team members on specific projects, not just your line manager and mentor. It depends on the size of your agency and the structure of your team. But it’s important to remember that when you are just starting out as a Medical Writer, you won’t have complex projects just dumped on you with no support.

You’ll often start by supporting other Medical Writers in the team on their projects, doing things like data checking or marking up reference packs in Veeva or Zinc. These tasks are great to help you understand the data and the references, plus introduce you to the range of projects within your account.

You might then progress to incorporating comments from clients or external experts on a draft originally written by another writer, or drafting simple content based on an approved outline.

As you gain more experience, you’ll get closer to being promoted to the next level, which is where the training wheels come off.

2. Medical Writer

There isn’t a hard and fast rule, but usually people will be promoted to Medical Writer after an absolute minimum of 6 months as an Associate Medical Writer, but 12–18 months isn’t unusual. As a Medical Writer, you are becoming a safe pair of hands with experience across a growing range of projects and therapy areas.

You’re definitely still learning though, and although the amount of formal training you receive is probably a lot less than when you were an Associate Medical Writer, you will still be developing. Instead of the formal training though, you are more likely to be learning by doing, and through the briefing and reviewing you receive from more senior team members.

I’ve known some Medical Writers who feel a bit hard done by at this stage – they were used to getting lots of training sessions and opportunities for development as an Associate Medical Writer, and then they get promoted to Medical Writer and feel like they’ve got stuck.

This is partly because a learning curve is just that – it’s a curve.

You can’t carry on learning at the same pace forever, and when we first start in a new career, everything is new, so that curve is incredibly steep.

Once you get to Medical Writer, you need to consolidate that early learning, practise your skills, try out different types of projects to become more confident at what you’re doing.

And even if it doesn’t feel like you’re getting trained, you definitely are. It might help to view every new project as a training opportunity, because genuinely that’s what it is.

Every brief you receive is a training document. Every piece of review feedback you get is a learning opportunity.

If you look at them this way and consider what you can take from them for future projects, how you can refine your process, then not only will you feel like you’re making more progress, you really will progress faster.

While your focus as a Medical Writer is developing content, you may also begin to be client facing. This might involve updating your client about your projects at a status meeting, and maybe joining calls with external experts to discuss their insights on your content.

Some writers find this quite daunting to begin with, but you will always be supported by your wider team, and agencies are usually very good at making sure you are ready to take on client facing responsibilities before you have to do it. After all, good client service is how they build a strong business, and they want to make sure that everyone involved in those relationships is able to do it well.

Something else you might start doing at this stage is going onsite to support at meetings. Again, you’ll be supported by your team, and you may even begin by shadowing a more senior writer so that you can see how it all works.

Going onsite is bloody hard work, but it’s incredibly rewarding and gives us a completely different perspective on our projects.

Seeing an investigator present slides that you wrote to a packed auditorium at a congress, or hearing experts at an advisory board discuss a question that you drafted – there’s nothing quite like it.

It makes you see the account you’re working on in a completely new way and brings the data to life, sparking new connections and accelerating your understanding in a way that nothing else can do.

If you get the chance to go onsite, take it, but pro tip, wear flat shoes.

3. Senior Medical Writer

Getting to Senior Medical Writer takes a bit of time, and you’ll probably have 3–5 years’ experience before you make this step. By this stage, you should be confident across several therapy areas and plenty of content types.

As your experience as a writer grows, you’ll still be focused on content development, and the majority of your time will be spent writing, and you’ll also probably be the key contact for clients and external experts on specific projects.

You may also start leading contact development though, working with more junior writers on some projects. I mentioned this earlier, that one of the early writing tasks that Associate Medical Writers are given may be taking in comments on a project that was originally drafted by another writer, or creating a first draft based on an approved outline.

This is obviously an excellent training scheme for new writers, but it’s also a really effective training mechanism for Senior Medical Writers.

Learning how to brief other writers effectively and then review their work constructively, is not easy. These are really specialised skills and I’m often asked to run training sessions on both of them within agencies to help people get to this senior level. But you also need to practise to transfer that learning into your own process.

Writing a brief means thinking about what needs to happen and why, and then getting that information across to the person who’ll be doing the work in a way that’s tailored to them – their skills, experience, and background knowledge level. And when we review what they’ve done, we need to give them feedback so that the project is updated appropriately, but also so that they can see the feedback as useful training to help them develop their skills.

Starting off with briefing out smaller elements of a project and then reviewing that in collaboration with the person who reviewed your original work, will help you develop these skills in a supported way.

As a Senior Medical Writer, you might also get involved with business development. This is likely to start off by doing background research on drugs, therapy areas, or companies.

When an agency has to prepare a proposal or a pitch, there usually isn’t much time, so it may well be an all hands on deck situation. Getting an experienced writer to provide a succinct summary of the therapy area, including current clinical practice, unmet needs for patients, and a summary of drugs in development, will inform the strategy.

Obviously this needs to be done quickly and efficiently, and once you’ve provided that background, you might also contribute to writing the actual proposal and maybe going on a pitch.

Clients love to see the team that they’ll be working with if they pick that agency, and one of the highlights of my early career was going to pitches.

It’s a fantastic learning opportunity. Basically a microcosm of the whole MedComms business – the strategy and how that develops into tactical rollout, budget options, team resourcing plans, building a relationship with clients – the whole shebang.

And pitches and proposals often involve incredibly senior team members, which might be a Senior Medical Writer’s only opportunity to work closely with these leaders.

4. Principal Medical Writer

After around 5–8 years in MedComms, you may become a Principal Medical Writer. This is a senior, experienced role, and as Principal Medical Writer, you are the go-to person for really tricky content, and a guru on writing excellence in the team.

A lot of Principal Medical Writers become quite heavily involved in training more junior colleagues, including leading formal sessions within new entry training programmes and mentoring new team members to help them get up to speed on therapy area and project types.

You might also have the opportunity to line manage one or two people – probably at the Associate Medical Writer or maybe Medical Writer level, though this depends on the agency.

You might be involved with developing and updating the processes used to develop content within the agency, or create account specific versions of these processes to ensure consistency, while also taking into consideration any nuances or preference that the client has that differ from the agency standard method.

These elements of the Principal Medical Writer role aren’t unusual, but they’re also not usually compulsory. There are plenty of Principal Medical Writers who prefer to focus on the content development, and that’s it.

As I said, all the most complex projects are likely to be earmarked for somebody at Principal Medical Writer level as you’ll have the experience to handle them. Many Principal Medical Writers love this, thriving on the challenge of these complicated tasks, and all they want is the time and headspace to crack on with the writing.

That being said, you may well also have the opportunity to balance those writing projects with leading the content on others. This is a continuation of the briefing and reviewing, I mentioned in the Senior Medical Writer section, but here you are likely to be briefing out the full content development process and maybe even work with the scientific leadership on your account to develop the strategy underlying the project before you brief it out to the assigned writer.

Different agencies handle this in different ways, and in some agencies, if you are leading projects like this, your role wouldn’t be called Principal Medical Writer.

5. Scientific Team Leader

Scientific Team Leader is sometimes a parallel role to Principal Medical Writer. They might be at the same level in the hierarchy, but each have a different focus. Sometimes scientific team leader is the next step up from Principal Medical Writer.

Either way, as a Scientific Team Leader, you are beginning to lead the content development from a scientific and strategic perspective on your team. This might be on a portfolio of projects within a larger account or maybe taking on the scientific leadership of a full small account.

At this stage of your career, your focus is switching from delivering individual projects to delivering the broader account, and this definitely includes briefing other writers and reviewing their work. You’ll do this much more frequently than doing the writing yourself, although there may be specific projects that you write on too.

Just like the Principal Medical Writers often pick up the more complex projects, these are sometimes assigned to Scientific Team Leaders, though your writing responsibilities at this level are likely to be more strategic.

For example, you might write the content for a publication planning meeting with your client, attend the meeting, and then write up the report and develop it into the full publication plan. But then you’d work with more junior writers on your team when delivering the manuscripts that you’ve mapped out within that publication plan.

As a Scientific Team Leader, you will work closely with Client Services team members on the budgets, timelines, and project management of your projects, reporting into senior leadership within the agency.

It’s usually more of a hybrid role than the junior writing roles, and this comes back to what I said about focusing on delivering the account rather than just the individual projects.

It is a major mindset shift and it doesn’t suit everyone, but if it does suit you, you may well be aiming for Scientific Director as your next step.

6. Scientific Director

By the time you’re a Scientific Director, you are likely to have the best part of a decade in MedComms under your belt. You will probably be line managing several people across the team, and when you develop content, it’s likely to be either pitches and proposals, or strategic recommendations for clients rather than project delivery.

You’ll be the scientific expert and strategic leader on your accounts, working in close collaboration with the senior Client Services team members and senior leadership within the agency on how to run those accounts.

Depending on the size of your team, you may well be supported by Scientific Team Leaders or Principal Medical Writers who lead the content development on some projects.

You’ll be responsible for the content development on your account though, in terms of accuracy and scientific rigour, strategy and meeting the client’s objectives, but also in terms of process and productivity.

Basically, you’ll be working with the Client Services team to ensure each project has a realistic budget, giving each task an appropriate amount of time.

You’ll then work with the writing team to ensure that they follow an appropriate process to deliver each task within their budgeted hours and to an excellent standard.

At Scientific Director level, you might set the processes for particular types of projects, or even be responsible for all processes, plus rolling out the training to ensure your team knows how they should be doing things. It depends on the size and structure of your agency.

Either way, you’ll need to have a thorough understanding of those processes, so that you can guide the client services team on how much time to include for all the scientific tasks in a project when they’re creating the budget. It is a tricky balancing act, but if teams don’t get it right, the agency won’t be commercially viable.

This comes back to the mindset shift that I introduced when we were talking about the Scientific Team Leader role, but at Scientific Director level, it gets even broader. You’re not just focusing on delivering the account, you’re starting to look at the agency business as a whole and directing things on your account to meet the business’s needs.

This can be such a challenging shift, because sometimes there’s so much going on within the projects that it’s easy to get sucked down into the details rather than keeping a big picture view. Also, there is sometimes a bit of a conflict between what would be good for one particular account and what would be best for the agency overall.

Being able to see these different perspectives clearly and resolve any conflict pragmatically can be a real challenge even for experienced Scientific Directors.

That being said, Scientific Director is an incredibly rewarding role working with a range of different team members across all of the different projects within the account, and working with the senior leadership, and obviously career progression doesn’t stop at Scientific Director level. There are plenty of other opportunities potentially within that agency senior leadership itself.

Download the PDF summary

MedComms is a vibrant and diverse industry, but if you consider the standard career path:

1. Starting off as an Associate Medical Writer and making the most of any training opportunities
2. Gaining confidence as a Medical Writer and becoming a safe pair of hands
3. Progressing to Senior Medical Writer, and potentially starting to lead content development with more junior writers
4. Then becoming a Principal Medical Writer and honing your sharp writing skills
5. Beginning to lead a portfolio of projects as a Scientific Team Leader
6. Before becoming the scientific expert and strategic leader on your account as a Scientific Director

You have within this structure a good starting point for understanding the specific career options available at different agencies.

You can download a summary of everything I’ve covered today from a link in the video description below, and you could use this to help you prepare for job interviews or list questions to ask recruiters about specific roles.

I’ve also made another video about how you can ace a medical writing test for when you get to that stage, and there’s also one about how you can take control of your medical writing career.

If this video has been helpful, I’d be really grateful if you could like it and maybe share it with anyone else who you know who’s interested in a career in MedComms as a Medical Writer, and feel free to leave a question in the comments if there’s anything else that I can help you with, or suggest any topics that you would find useful for me to explore in future videos.