4 Side Gigs for Pharmacists
Since I started my side hustle in medical writing, I have come to realize that it is essential to diversify income sources. Few companies have all their revenue coming from one product, and virtually no investor would recommend having everything in just one type of investment. Yet many people are fine with all their income coming from one source. Even if you’re drawing a high salary, a layoff or an unforeseen situation where you are cut off from that income will result in earnings going to zero.
A side hustle is a great way not only to diversify your income, but also to diversify your skills, open up to new types of work, and also help pay off student loans, build your emergency fund, or reach your other financial goals more quickly. Many financial advisors, among others, recommend socking away 3 to 6 months of living expenses as an emergency fund.
While various things can make for a great hustle, let’s look specifically at side hustles that allow you to use your pharmacy knowledge to earn extra money.
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1) Consulting
Consulting is an expansive field and can include nearly anything pharmacists are involved in. Pharmacists have gotten into consulting for sterile compounding; PBM and insurance contracting; pharmacogenomics testing and interpretation; pharmacy operations; and much more.
The sky is really the limit, and if you’re an expert in a pharmacy niche, consulting could be a great side hustle. Another advantage is that the experience could help you land a consulting or leadership position at a company in the future.
How to get started
I’ve spoken with pharmacists who have successfully launched consulting businesses, and a consistent message I hear is that you start with your network. Think about the pharmacists and businesses you currently know or work with: Are any of them struggling with a problem you could help solve?
After landing your first client, word of mouth and client testimonials will help you grow your business.
2) Teaching
The obvious choice for getting a teaching gig might be at a pharmacy school, and while that is true, pharmacists have lots of other options to land a part-time teaching role. Other schools that value pharmacists include pharmacy technician programs, nursing schools, physician assistant programs, and medical schools.
Adjunct positions offer the chance to teach just one or two courses, so you can keep your day job. One great thing about teaching on the side is that it could eventually lead to a full-time teaching position later, if that is something of interest.
How to get started
With remote learning becoming more common, your teaching job doesn’t necessarily have to be confined to your geographic area. I would recommend using any number of job boards and searching for keywords like “pharmacy faculty,” “pharmacology faculty,” or even “PharmD faculty.”
Because there is a possibility of teaching remotely, leaving off a geographic area will help ensure your search results return those opportunities.
3) Expert witness and expert consultant
I had never heard of getting paid to be an expert witness until I got an email from a law firm, asking if I would be interested in serving as one. While this particular law firm ultimately needed someone with more specific experience in a certain aspect of pharmacy operations, I became interested in the field as a way to earn extra income.
Expert witnesses testify in court and so must be cool under pressure, but law firms also hire expert consultants that do not testify, but rather research and provide input on the legal defense (or prosecution) for cases.
How to get started
SEAK has probably the largest directory and is also the most prominent source for expert witnesses and expert consultants. (It’s the directory the law firm referred me to after reaching out.) SEAK offers training in the field as well, including being a persuasive witness at a trial, writing an effective expert witness report, and more.
Another way to get started is to search for expert witness and consultant firms, and contact those firms about getting in their directory of experts.
4) Medical writing
This is my side hustle, so I can tell you from experience both the positives and negatives. On one hand you can earn income fully remotely, set your own hours, get paid to review clinical content (you have to review it to write about it), and write a lot of different and interesting pieces. It is a wide field that includes writing for trade publications, continuing education (CE), medical science liaison (MSL) and drug representative training materials, conference presentations and summaries, and regulatory writing, among some of the work.
On the other hand, though, time management is crucial. Many projects pay per project or by the word, so it is very different from an hourly job you clock into and get paid, no matter what. You are solely responsible for ensuring the project is completed on time and up to the company’s editorial standards — whether that takes you an hour or 10 hours. At times, there might be some negotiation in the price of each piece, so it will be important to understand how long it could take you to do the work.
Finally, taking a true vacation, without doing any work, is difficult as a freelance writer. There are deadlines to meet, whether you’re on break or not. But if you love to write, have excellent time management skills, and want to be involved in interesting projects, medical writing might be for you.
How to get started
The best advice I give any healthcare professional looking to get into medical writing is to focus on your clinical skills. There might be writers out there with much more experience, but they may not have a clinical degree or be in a totally different field.
A good way to get going is to reach out to trade publications and CE providers, and pitch specific topics. I have seen several CE providers openly asking for topic proposals on their websites, for example, and the editors of trade publications are good contacts for non-CE articles. As you build experience, you can branch out into other kinds of writing.
If you’re interested in learning more, I’ve produced a piece with tips to keep the work coming, an article answering common questions about medical writing, and a course to teach what I learned mostly the hard way over the past 5 years.
The bottom line
A side hustle can allow you to diversify your income, better reach your financial goals, and gain new job skills that could lead to a promotion or even the option of a career change. While there are a lot of options and it might feel overwhelming at first, the most important thing is to get started. With time, the pieces will start to fall in place.
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