SALARY DATA

The salary comparisons covered in this section are as follows:

• Time spent in industry

• Highest qualification

• Type of company

• Size of company

• Most important job factors

• Least important job factors

• Job title

• Gender

• Fairness of salary & remuneration package

• Legal responsibilities

Interestingly, the average salary of the respondents with a smaller number of years’ experience in medical information was higher than the equivalent average salary in pharmacovigilance. However, by 20+ years’ experience it was the average salary of the experienced pharmacovigilance respondents that was higher.

The number of medical information respondents with 16-20 years’ worth of experience was very small and this may be the reason behind the apparent anomaly.

One further factor to consider is that some of the respondents had experience in both medical information and pharmacovigilance. When compared with the average salary for all those with pharmaceutical experience (£65,901), respondents with combined medical information and pharmacovigilance experience earned a higher average salary (£69,224).

AVERAGE SALARY (£) PER TIME SPENT IN INDUSTRY

Average salary per highest qualification ranged from £39,543 (GCSE or equivalent) to £105,750 (BPharm). A consideration here is that there were a very small number of respondents with a BPharm as their highest qualification and the average number of years’ experience was 15+. When compared with the average number of years’ experience of the respondents with an MPharm as their highest qualification (4.3) the difference in average salary becomes clearer. Other qualifications provided included:

85811

63369 77500 75948 57269 69987 55862 105750 50300 39543

AVERAGE SALARY (£) PER HIGHEST QUALIFICATION

Respondents from PV outsource companies averaged the highest salary with £71,792. However, when a couple of salaries significantly higher than the rest due to other factors were removed, the average for ‘PV outsource companies’ fell to £55,150. Other types of companies where respondents did not receive a car or car allowance included ‘CRO’ and ‘Other’. ‘Other’ included (but not limited to):

The type of company with the lowest average salary as per the survey responses was diagnostic companies, but a contributing factor to this may have been that the number of respondents from a diagnostic company was very small in comparison to the other types of company.

AVERAGE SALARY (£) PER TYPE OF COMPANY

With the exception of companies with 26-50 employees, the average salary decreases as the size of the company increases. However, the number of benefits in general appears to increase along with the size of the company. Companies with over 1000 employees paid the lowest average salary but provided the highest number of benefits.