Making Our Profession Sustainable

Just this week, two people from our community told me they’d been laid off. It’s great to see all those new job postings, but there’s still turmoil out there, clearly. Is it the industry? Is it our profession? Is it both?

We must give ourselves grace, but with so many companies shedding biopharma, comms jobs or being reluctant to hire, there’s a gap between the value we know we can bring and the lack of perceived value of the function as a whole.

Examining the causes of that gap is what’s driving what we as a community must do to advance the profession. Here are some thoughts that could be contributing to that gap:

• Misconceptions among non-communicators that tech solutions and AI can do what we do.
• Bad experiences, lack of experience, or even unwillingness to gain experience with well-rounded comms pros.
• Unrealistic expectations for immediate results, and impatience.
• And this one might be controversial—fuzzy accountability mechanisms and support systems for each other and for the profession as a whole.

T2B is taking steps, baby steps, but steps nonetheless, to create this infrastructure to not only make this community sustainable, but — let’s face it — to rethink how we can make our profession as biopharma communicators sustainable, too.