Opportunities in Medical Writing

Being a medical writer opens a lot of possibilities. This is a vast field with massive demand for technical communication. Let’s take a closer look at job opportunities of medical writing.

We have already covered the basics of medical writing. So, just to quickly revisit the basics – all medical writing efforts can be divided into two categories: regulatory medical writing and medical communication (medcomms). Regulatory medical writing jobs require a certain background. Ideally, a degree in science or medicine.

Today we would like to give you examples of real medical writing jobs with a description. Our primary source of information is the American Medical Writers Association.

Regulatory Medical Writing Opportunities

Let’s start with a more complex type of medical writing – regulatory medical writing.

• A scientific medical writer working for a medical communications company/agency

You will need to prepare various manuscripts both clinical and pre-clinical. Also, creating abstracts and posters can be part of your responsibilities. Quite often medical writers in this role prepare trial reports and work on materials for medical education. Creating pharmaceutical or health care educational programs is another possible task for this role.

• A medical writer working in a pharmaceutical company

It is clear from the role name that you will have to work a lot with study reports and brochures. By ‘working’ we mean planning, writing, editing, and reviewing. Reviewing is a big part of this workflow, you can find more information on establishing a high-quality review process here.

• A publication editor working in a medical center

Publication editors supervise and manage the whole process of publication of articles, posters, user manuals.

• A medical writer working in a health care communications company

In this role, medical writers are often involved in preparing white papers, promotional materials. Creating white papers requires high skills of working with big amounts of data and being able to produce summaries.

• A director of scientific editing working in a biotech company

This is the first role on the list connected with management. It presupposes that you have enough knowledge in the area to be able to not only edit scientific papers but also teach others medical writing.

Medical Communication Opportunities

The next list of jobs will be less hardcore – you can likely land them even as a technical writer without a background in medical sciences. These occupations are connected with medcomms.

• A medical writer working for a medcomms company/agency

Medical writers often create educational materials for pharmaceutics and health care.

• A medical editor working for a medcomms company/agency

Medical editors prepare and proofread articles for medical journals, presentations, posters.

• A public information officer working in an academic medical center

Although this job has a very serious title, it is actually not that sciency. Writing news releases, articles, newsletters, developing Web content and working with the media are the main responsibilities of a public information officer in this sphere.

Conclusion

In this post, we provided you with several examples of real-life occupations in the medical writing sphere. As you understand, these descriptions are not set in stone – we only gave you the outline of what such jobs might be. We hope that you will find the information helpful!

Good luck with your technical writing!
ClickHelp Team
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