Dear Christine, Your shift decision is courageous and deserves admiration, good luck !

I made a similar shift 14 years ago in France, with an experience both in industry and ad agencies, such is the frame of some personal reflexions I can give to your judgement :

1. due to a great many applicants from those trainings, marketing jobs appear to be mostly preempted by people with a background of pharmacist and, to a lesser extent, doctor (sometime dentist, ...)
2. the internal promotion policy of laboratories, that formerly welcomed and favoured the shift seem to have integrated this fact and now give the narrow-minded preference to those people (not to speak of further potential ladder-up discriminations ...)
3. assistant product manager is a low-responsability position for quite inexperienced young people and your are experienced and autonomous, so, disappointment may arise,
4. we must always be very cautious about promises of potential internal promotion during recrutment, they often remain vain and forgotten ...
5. on the contrary Ad agencies are much more open-minded, eagerly in search of people with extensive experience with laboratories : who better than a former highly professional customer can properly understand the marketing needs of a lab customer? And if promotional perospects are theoretically less important in small stuctures such as ad agencies, people are given many more opportunities.

I hope these personal considerations might be of some assistance to you.

Warmest regards

Chrissy,

You appear well positioned for the agency and product manager career path. Of course you could pursue both. I have been a product manager, and I now a managing partner at an agency.

Though my preference at this point in my career is to manage an agency, I draw on my in-house marketing skills and experience everyday. A longer-term plan for you might be to attempt to secure a product management position at a pharma (a challenge these days) with the option to ultimately transition to an agency.

I also think the MBA is a good idea. I would consider a concentration in Pharmaceutical Marketing. St. Joseph's University has an excellent Pharma Marketing MBA program.

http://www.sju.edu/hsb/pharmaceutical_marketing/

I hope this helps,

Since you are talking about Pharmaceutical MBA Programs, I must point out Rutgers Business School's MBA in Pharmaceutical Management. The program is sponsored by Pfizer, Merck, J&J, Eisai, BMS, Novartis, Roche, and Organon. They also offer full scholarships (paid for by the sponsoring companies) for outstanding candidates with industry experience. Courses are taught both by academics and industry executives. In addition, the sponsoring companies each offer on-site seminars on pharmaceutical topics (one per month). The program is in its fourth year and continues to grow.

Make sure to check it out.

http://business.rutgers.edu/pharm-mba/default.htm