Portfolio careers in pharmacy — transcription

Katherine: Hello and welcome to another learning episode of The PJ Pod, brought to you by The Pharmaceutical Journal, the official journal of the Royal College of Pharmacy. I’m research and learning editor Katherine Sole and in this episode, we’ll be talking about portfolio careers. 

You may have heard this term before but not really been sure what it means. The term ‘portfolio career’ began appearing in UK pharmacy literature in the mid-90s, with individual pharmacists describing their multi-sector working lives. Essentially, it means having more than one role in different organisations, sectors or even industries.

Someone might work two days a week in a community pharmacy and also teach at a university or conduct research. They might have an NHS hospital role, and also work as a freelance medical writer, and do something in digital health. There are no real limits to the combinations possible, and with the rapid evolution that we’ve seen in the profession, the opportunities to take a portfolio approach are increasing.

Today we’re talking to two pharmacists, Ruhina Kassam and Hayley Berry, who each have portfolio careers. We’ll discuss the advantages — as they see it — of juggling multiple roles and the pitfalls to watch out for and hear their tips on how they make it work.

We’ll start with Ruhina Kassam. Ruhina is the CEO of Clinical Pharmacist Solutions, the host of The Clinical Pharmacist podcast and the director of professional standards and quality assurance at DPP Connect, a platform for independent prescribing placements.

She was one of the PJ’s 2024 Women to Watch. Ruhina is directly involved in recruitment for primary care, so she has a great perspective on trends in the field. I started by asking her whether people actively pursue a portfolio career or whether it’s something they end up in, perhaps because of a lack of full-time roles.

Ruhina: I think that is purely down to experience and potentially a mixture of both, but I think that will be different for everyone. I think we’re actually seeing a lot more portfolio careers, and that’s particularly because pharmacists actually, in my opinion, have more opportunities today rather than fewer.

So I think the profession is changing enormously. And when I first qualified, I think the career pathways felt much more defined. So you either had community, hospital or industry. Now, we’ve got pharmacists working in general practice, PCNs [primary care networks], digital health, academia, research, commissioning, education, consultancy. There’s so many different areas for me to name and list. Independent prescribing has expanded, and those opportunities have taken new roles even further.

I think also people are increasingly looking for flexibility and variety. They want to maintain patient-facing work, but also exploring teaching, leadership and other professional interests. We have a lot of pharmacists that are actually going into building their own businesses and developing their own personal interests at the same time.

So it’s really interesting to see. I think, of course, for some people, you’ve got economic circumstances or availability of roles will play a part, but I think it’s increasingly becoming a conscious career choice, and people are asking themselves what they really want their career to look like rather than feeling like they have to follow a specific or predetermined pathway. 

Katherine: By the way, The PJ Pod Inside Jobs podcast series is a really great place to hear from pharmacists who often have forged their own unique career pathways. But back to Ruhina, why did she choose a portfolio career and how did she get there?

Ruhina: For me personally, I was definitely driven by curiosity and wanting to upskill and develop. I started in community pharmacy, where I was a pharmacy manager, and whilst I was the pharmacy manager, I completed my clinical diploma and my independent prescribing qualification.

So, at that time, there were really very few opportunities to utilise your prescribing skills within primary care. So I think as a profession now, we are seeing more and more opportunities within community pharmacy to use your prescribing skills. But back then, it wasn’t really something that was available.

So, I started working a couple of days within general practice, and this helped me to start to upskill myself within clinical practice and prescribing. From there, I moved into digital healthcare, health tech world, and I started a role at Babylon GP at Hand, which gave me that experience that I wanted in health tech, learning about product, clinical care, governance, quality assurance and actually just being able to prescribe in a remote environment.

I then became one of the earlier PCN pharmacists, so I helped to develop the first-ever pharmacy hub within PCNs, and that introduced me to training and workforce development.

So, I had a team of pharmacists and technicians who I helped to upskill, help through their prescribing, and learn how to manage a workforce. Eventually, all of those experiences came together into the role that I’m doing today, where I am the CEO of a clinical services company. So, looking back, I’ve had a portfolio career, as we say, for quite a long time.

Katherine: So that’s Ruhina. The other portfolio pharmacist I interviewed for this episode was Hayley Berry. Hayley has been a pharmacist for over 20 years.

She works at the Centre for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education, is a menopause specialist, is an academic advisor in the independent prescribing programme at the University of Manchester and has her own aesthetics clinic. How did she arrive where she is, combining all these different roles?

Hayley: When I first qualified, I worked in hospital pharmacy, and then I used to locum in community pharmacy alongside that, and then I decided that I quite liked community pharmacy, and I got offered an opportunity to work in community. So I went across and did that full-time. And then I think I fell into CPPE, so I did that local tutor role. And I would say that CPPE has really opened up lots of opportunities for me.

It gets you into conversations with people either at events or networking conversations. And I just think I’ve always been quite interested in what other people are doing. So when I’ve chatted to different pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, I’ve always been quite interested in how they’ve got to where they’ve got to, because I think everyone’s got a really different career path, haven’t they, of how they’ve got into different roles.

And I think for me, it has been just opportunities and networking conversations at conferences and different things. My other half always says I collect jobs. He’s like: “You’re one of these people that just collect jobs.” And I’m like: “I think that’s quite typical of a lot of pharmacists maybe, pharmacy professionals, is that you do sort of collect different interesting things that you like doing.”

And I’m also rubbish at saying no. And I think that that’s good in that I get loads of experience doing different things, but then I think I need to say no a little bit more just so I’m not completely frantically busy. But yeah, I think it’s just networking and conversations I think is how my career has progressed, is just being in the right place at the right time, and just being open to doing different things that I perhaps wouldn’t have thought of doing to start with.

Katherine: It sounds like professional curiosity, and being able to follow their individual interests, have been the guiding forces behind both Ruhina’s and Hayley’s career choices. So now I wanted to find out what the biggest benefits of having a portfolio career have been. Here’s Ruhina first.

Ruhina: I think the biggest benefit has been the breadth of experience and skills that I’ve developed. So working across different environments exposes you to different people, different problems, different ways of thinking, and I think just different mindsets in general. You also get that cross-pollination of skills.

So for example, my experience in community pharmacy gave me a practical understanding of patients and their meds. Primary care developed my clinical and prescribing skills. Digital health taught me about governance, tech and delivering care remotely. And developing pharmacist clinical services taught me about leadership, workforce, and development and education. Those experiences now come together in everything that I do today.

So there’s variety. So for some people, doing the same things five days a week is perfect, but for others, having different elements to their week keeps them engaged, continuously learning. They feel like they’re not stuck doing the same thing. So also, we’ve got what everybody loves, that greater flexibility and the potential to control your own career.

Katherine: Ruhina also made a good point about how having a portfolio career can make someone less vulnerable in future job markets.

Ruhina: And I think another one is career resilience. So you’re building transferrable skills and a broader professional network rather than being completely dependent on one role or one sector. So for me, a good portfolio career isn’t about just having loads of different job titles. It’s about collecting those experiences that make you better at what you do and building those skills to apply to any sector, whether it’s pharmacy or whether it’s a completely different sector. 

Katherine: And here’s what Hayley had to say.

Hayley: The pros, I would say, it’s really interesting … it gets you variety to be involved in different things, so it’s never really boring. And you’ve always got wriggle room to do different things if you don’t work in one place all of the time.

I think it’s a variety of work, the variety of people that you get to meet. I think definitely in my menopause, in my private role, I’ve worked with amazing doctors, nurses, other pharmacists, and really expanded my networks that way. And then that gives you opportunities.

For example, me and one of my colleagues went to Barcelona, at the European Association of Hospital Pharmacists in March to speak at their conference about menopause, which I would never have done had I not been chatting to someone and made networks that way, because we would never have got invited to go there.

And I just think a good pro is that it keeps pushing me out of my comfort zone to do different things that I wouldn’t probably do in a normal job, I guess, when I look back at my career over the last 20 years. 

Katherine: So there are a variety of benefits then: opportunities to develop a range of skills, lots of variety to keep you interested, it’s great for building a network and finding new avenues to explore, and of course there’s a lot of flexibility. But as with anything, there are potential pitfalls that need to be considered when working across more than one role. I asked Hayley and Ruhina what they consider to be the biggest challenges.

Hayley: I think probably it’s trying to switch between jobs. Sometimes I think it would be quite nice just to have one job and just worry about one thing… it does mean that my brain is very busy juggling different things

Ruhina: So I think one of the biggest pitfalls is probably overcommitting yourself. So portfolio careers can sound like flexibility and freedom, but it doesn’t necessarily mean working less. So you’re potentially balancing different organiszations, different teams, different responsibilities and deadlines, so you have to be really good at managing your time and setting those boundaries.

So it’s really easy, especially when you’re quite ambitious or interested in lots of different things, to keep saying yes to opportunities, and I’ve definitely learned that over time. Just because an opportunity is interesting and exists doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to take it. So you can burn yourself out by trying to do too many things, and I think you don’t want to dilute yourself.

There can also be things such as conflict of interest, and you don’t really realise that so much when you’re not doing a portfolio career or when you’re not doing a lot of different things. So you have to be really transparent with the people that you’re working with, especially when you’re working across different organisations.

So depending on the type of portfolio career you have as well, income may be less predictable, particularly if you’re combining maybe employment with locum work or freelance or consultancy work. So you have to be quite clear on that, about your income as well. 

Katherine: We’ve heard about how portfolio careers work for individual pharmacists, but what about the perception amongst employers? Are they open to recruiting for this type of role?

Ruhina: So I think traditionally, having a few different roles might have been seen as someone’s attention being divided, but actually, I think that that person may be bringing a huge amount of external knowledge and experience back into the organisation.

So if someone works clinically but also teaches, they’re bringing in educational skills to the clinical environment. Someone working across community pharmacy and primary care understands both sides of the patient pathway.

Someone with experience in digital health might bring a completely different idea about technology and service delivery. So I think employers could be more open to things like flexible working, part-time roles, job sharing and allowing people to maintain appropriate external professional interests.      

Katherine: Ruhina also made the point that employers might actually need to be more open to this working arrangement going forward if they want to keep hold of good people.

Ruhina: I think as pharmacy continues to evolve, I think employers who offer that flexibility will find it easier to attract and retain really good people. I think for the last few years, we’ve seen retention of pharmacists in roles has been quite difficult, and where I work within Clinical Pharmacist Solutions, we see a lot of practices approach us because they’re having trouble retaining pharmacists.

And I think that flexibility, that difference in what you’re doing day-to-day with portfolio careers really actually will help as a good retention mechanism as well.

Katherine: There are so many ways to combine roles in a portfolio career. I asked Ruhina how people tend to split their time and how they can avoid overcommitting.

Ruhina: I think that varies from clinician to clinician. So you might spend a few days a week working in primary care, and that will be with what the GP practice will want you to have. So they might need someone on a Monday when it’s the busiest time or on a Friday, and then you might feel that you want to work within community pharmacy on three days a week or work within academia.

I think it’s really about building a schedule with the people that you’ll be working with. But jumping back to what I mentioned before, I think transparency and if you are committing to a role, that there’s other opportunities that are there, it doesn’t affect you from working in the role that you’ve already committed to.

So I think jumping back to your question, I think it completely varies between individual, what role, what sector of pharmacy, or what kind of portfolio work that they’re doing. There’s not really one set schedule. 

Katherine: Hayley currently works Monday to Thursday at CPPE, and fits the work for her other roles in around that, according to what suits her.

Hayley: Where I’ve worked at a private clinic for two days and CPPE for three days, I did used to be quite strict. I’d just do my three days and then I’d switch laptops, physically swap laptops, and then I wouldn’t be thinking about my other job while I was trying to do the other one.

Because it is quite hard, I think, to switch between them. You don’t want to be trying to do one job while you’ve got half your brain thinking about the other job. So I do think it’s good to have a plan of what you’re going to work on, in the week, definitely. And that’s how I’ve managed my time. But everyone’s different, aren’t they? I see, I speak to other people that do loads of different jobs, and they’re like: “Oh, I quite like doing a bit here and a bit there.” And I mean, that’s what my Fridays are like, and it’s quite nice. If I wake up and I think, “Oh, I want to be doing more of this today”, then I can do that.

Because it’s my own business with aesthetics, people message and things, and I just deal with those in the evenings. And I have set clinic times, so I can plan my time, which works well.

Katherine: And it’s not just time management that can be complicated in a portfolio career, your finances will be more complicated, too. Ruhina and Hayley both stressed the importance of hiring the appropriate professional help.

Ruhina: So when you’re doing a lot of different things, we’ve seen pharmacists working with limited companies or working as sole traders, so it’s really important to get the right advice and the right accountant or tax advisor to make sure that you are doing all the right things. You need to think about professional indemnity, making sure that you’ve got the right insurance and you’re appropriately covered across different roles and different areas if you’re doing that.

Hayley: I haven’t found it an issue, but I think that’s because I just send all my stuff to my accountant and say: “Please help me with all this. I don’t know how to do it all.” [laughs] So I think you just do need to be more organised, I guess.

Katherine: It sounds like you do. So if you’ve got this far and are thinking a portfolio career of your own would suit you, how do you actually get started? I asked Ruhina and Hayley what advice they’d give to anyone thinking about building this career for themselves.

Ruhina: I think the best portfolio careers start small. You find out what you’re really good at and find out how to naturally just develop rather than doing, being a jack of all trades and a master of none.

I think especially now we’re going to have a lot of pharmacists that are coming out of their degrees, with their independent prescribing. I think it’s really own your skills, find out what you’re really good at, build confidence in one area before trying to do 100 different things at once. So it’s really just finding out what your interests are and where you want to go from there.

Hayley: I think it’s make it work for you. Have lots of conversations with people and just be nosy. That’s how I’ve got to where I’ve got to, I think. I look at where I’m working in my menopause clinic now, and that’s because of someone that I met six or seven years ago at a meeting who happened to live near me, a sexual health nurse. And I’ve had loads of amazing, amazing connections through her.

I wouldn’t be where I am today without that conversation and just being interested and asking her what she was doing and how she’d got there. …there’s loads of opportunities for pharmacists and pharmacy technicians now, way more than when we qualified. And I just think it’s just spending time to talk to people and find out what they’re doing. And I think community pharmacy now is a really exciting and interesting place to work. I just think it’s just trying to find the right mix that works for you as an individual.

Katherine: So what have we learned about portfolio careers? We’ve heard how they offer variety and flexibility, but finances, taxation and pensions will almost certainly be more complex and you will probably need professionals to guide you. You also need to be disciplined about managing your time and understanding what capacity you have to take on anything extra.

One thing that came across clearly to me was that you’re unlikely to start your career this way. The first step toward building a portfolio career is to identify what you enjoy most and are best at, and you’ll need some experience in the profession before you can do this. However, once you do identify a possible opportunity  — as Hayley said — don’t be shy about approaching people, stay open to things and make it work for you.

Our thanks to Ruhina Kassam and Hayley Berry for sharing their experience and reflections. And thanks to you for listening. If you’ve enjoyed this episode of The PJ Pod, it would really help us if you could like, share and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.

Until the next learning episode, it’s goodbye from us.