In recent years, the pharmaceutical industry has undergone constant shifts and changes in response to scientific discoveries, technological advancements, regulatory forces, and evolving markets. This field is also growing rapidly, with the US pharmaceutical market reaching over $570B in 2023 and projected to exceed $1T by 2030.
As professionals in these growing fields navigate evolving technology, changing role responsibilities, and widening skill gaps, employees often are left discouraged and ill-equipped to meet the needs of their roles and comply with ever-changing regulatory requirements. Learning and development teams must provide support through role-based pharma training to give their employees the upskilling and guidance they need to successfully navigate a post-transformation pharma industry.
By viewing employee training as a strategic investment rather than a regulatory obligation, pharmaceutical and life sciences companies can improve the experience of pharma employees, prepare them with hands-on training, support them in their day-to-day roles, ensure teams can meet their goals and comply with regulations, and drive business outcomes.
In this article, we will outline key factors requiring a reinvention of team member training at pharma and life sciences organizations and common areas requiring training. We will also provide best practices for developing effective pharma training programs and detail common challenges contextual to the pharma and life science sector.
Key Drivers Behind Pharma and Life Sciences Training Demands
Pharmaceutical and life sciences businesses are subject to unique regulatory requirements and other complex demands that require unique onboarding and training programs. Compliance and competency in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries can impact the safety, health, and well-being of millions of individuals who rely on the drugs these companies produce. This makes optimized training vital.
Here are some of the most significant factors fueling the need for specialized training for pharma and life sciences employees:
High regulatory burden
Pharmaceutical and life sciences businesses must adhere to strict and frequently updated laws and regulations from government agencies. These agencies require that employees receive ongoing, thorough training programs covering topics like Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), Good Clinical Practices (GCP), Good Laboratory Practices (GLP), HIPAA, and data security and integrity.
These compliance training programs equip employees with the resources and information they need to fulfill their responsibilities ethically and meet requirements for audits and inspections.
Rapid technological transformation
As AI, automation, and digital software are integrated into pharma employees’ roles, their responsibilities and workflows are being redefined. The pharmaceutical and life sciences fields find themselves adapting at their core to new technological advancements, requiring constant upskilling and a commitment to agility.
Complex product and research knowledge
Workers in the pharmaceutical and life sciences fields use specialized tools that require specific skillsets and an understanding of emerging research in relevant areas of study.
For example, some universities even offer intensive short courses to educate professionals working for biomedical engineering companies on relevant physiology and anatomy topics to ensure they have the information they need to design effective biomedical devices. Though rigorous courses are not always required, pharma employees need effective training to understand the science behind what they do to be truly effective in their roles.
Cross-functional collaboration requirements
Employees in the pharmaceutical industry often need to collaborate with colleagues in different business areas, whether they work in research and development, clinical operations, or commercial functions. To create an agile and engaged team, pharmaceutical workers need to understand the nature of their colleagues’ work.
Strong cross-functional collaboration requires comprehensive training, covering colleagues’ work functions, project management needs, and how to use cross-functional software like electronic master files (eTMF), clinical trial management systems (CTMS), quality management systems (QMS), ERP systems, and customer relationship management software (CRM).
Key Training Areas for Pharma and Life Sciences Organizations
Pharmaceutical and life sciences employees require specific expertise and unique skillsets. Here are six of the most essential training areas for employees in pharma and life sciences:
End-user training for digital tasks and tools
Pharma employees often use industry-specific software (like RIM systems, QMS software, and EHR software) and common enterprise systems (like ERP and CRM). By providing employees with end-user software training, L&D and people managers can ensure that team members understand how to use software efficiently to fulfill their responsibilities and comply with legal and industry-wide regulations.
Here are some common digital tools used by pharma and life sciences employees:
- Regulatory Information Management (RIM) software
- Quality Management System (QMS)
- Electronic Health Record (EHR) Systems
- Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS)
- Clinical Trial Management Systems (CTMS)
- Research portals
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
- Supply Chain Management (SCM)
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
GxP compliance training
Good practice (GxP) training in different areas, like laboratory practice (GLP), manufacturing practice (GMP), and clinical practice (GLP), to adhere to appropriate and effective procedures. Training employees on good practices helps employees learn to carry out responsibilities safely, ethically, and effectively.
Organizations must also quickly adapt to changing compliance requirements as regulations change, which means embedded change communication and workflow support for employees within their tasks and workflows.
Clinical trial training
Pharma research employees need regular clinical trial training to understand the latest regulatory requirements and industry best practices for drug development, manufacturing, and sales activities. This type of training helps employees safeguard participants, ensure integrity in research, and produce reliable and replicable outcomes.
Regulatory affairs and submission processes
Pharmaceutical employees’ work is constrained by complex and evolving laws and regulations related to developing, manufacturing, and distributing new medicines. This requires regular training to help employees understand their expectations and responsibilities and ensure compliance across the board.
Manufacturing SOPs and QA/QC
Whether they work on production lines or carry out clinical trials, pharmaceutical employees need a thorough and consistent understanding of standard operating procedures (SOPs). By ensuring that employees adhere closely to established SOPs and quality control measures, L&D teams can help teams make fewer errors, produce higher-quality products, and ensure patient safety while complying with regulations.
Soft skills
Pharmaceutical employees need soft skills like strategic thinking, teamwork, emotional intelligence, and time management to execute medical strategies and fulfill their responsibilities. From development to sales, effective soft skills training helps employees collaborate to solve problems and have better interactions with trial participants, medical professionals, and patients.
Best Practices for Building a Compliant, Future-Ready Pharma Training Program
The pharmaceutical industry’s particularities require unique workplace training programs with industry-specific content, strong documentation features, and robust compliance components.
Here are some best practices you can follow to develop a strong training program for your pharmaceutical employees:
Align training with compliance, quality, and business goals
An effective pharma team member training program can help leaders cultivate a strong workforce while ensuring safe and legal operations. Build a framework for your training program built around compliance, high-quality development and production outcomes, and larger-scale organizational goals.
Use these pillars to define strategic training objectives, guide learning content creation, and evaluate the program during and after rollout.
Provide hands-on training experiences
Hands-on learning helps employees absorb more information more thoroughly in less time. Offer employees opportunities to engage in hands-on learning through job shadowing or role-playing.
Organizations can create sandbox applications with a tool like Whatfix Mirror to accelerate time-to-proficiency for new pharma employees and drive adoption of new software implementations and workflow changes.
Mirror enables L&D and compliance leaders to create replica software environments that can be used for structured training or creative workflow experimentation. Virtual lab simulators can also help lab technicians practice new protocols safely.
Leaders can encourage innovation while helping employees master new skills by allowing employees to learn and practice using new software or workflows in risk-free replica environments.
→ Easily create replica versions of your enterprise applications and workflows to provide hands-on user training, without technical dependencies.
→ Embed timely in-app experiences to drive knowledge retention and improve user training.
→ Auto-capture user engagement and training data to understand your simulated training’s impact.
Embed training in the flow of work
Traditional training methods are no longer acceptable in the modern workplace. Employees require personalized, immersive approaches to drive proficiency and knowledge retention. Organizations must provide employees with in-app support and microlearning at precise moments of need with relevant information, helping to drive productivity.
The Whatfix Digital Adoption Platform enables pharma and life science companies to enable employees in the flow of work with embedded task support and in-app guidance. Whatfix works with everyday workplace software to provide moment-of-need guidance through role-based tasks and workflows.
Through in-app messages and walkthroughs, Whatfix supports employees to learn new software by using it, eliminates training burdens on managers, drives productivity, and facilitates change.
→ Guide users through complex apps with contextual, role-based in-app guidance.
→ Support users at the moment of need with AI-powered Self Help and embedded workflow assistance.
→ Analyze user engagement to identify friction points and optimize business processes.
Incorporate real-world scenarios
Emphasizing context and relevance in workplace training can boost learning retention and training objectives and outcomes. Keep pharma employees engaged as they learn by incorporating real-world scenarios, similar to situations they might experience at work, into training content. Including realistic examples and role-playing scenarios in training can help employees respond more quickly and confidently when issues arise.
Track progress, completion, and competency
Training, like medicine, should be taken according to a prescribed regimen for optimal results. Managers and L&D teams should track progress as employees engage with training programs and assess their resulting performance to determine the actual impact of training.
Tracking training effectiveness provides data that helps managers and other business leaders understand areas of friction for employees and adapt content to ensure better outcomes.
Leverage L&D technology
Workplace training program development is a sizeable undertaking. Modern L&D software can facilitate program development, implementation, and maintenance. Many of these tools can be delivered digitally and completed independently, making them more enjoyable for the employees doing the training as well.
Here are some examples of commonly used types of L&D software:
- Learning Management Systems (LMS) are centralized platforms for building, delivering, and assessing training programs.
- Digital Adoption Platforms (DAP) are digital tools that support software users as they learn to use new applications or carry out new workflows through in-app tutorials and personalized guidance.
- Document & SOP documentation tools help leaders develop uniform procedures and disseminate detailed step-by-step instructions for complex workflows to help with process governance and enforcement.
- Audit trail software: applications that track user activity and create logs that can be accessed for quality control or audit purposes.
- Validation systems: tools that ensure that an organization’s computer system operates per industry standards and legal regulations.
Reassess and update training content regularly
Training programs must evolve alongside the pharmaceutical industry’s ever-changing landscape—from regulatory updates to new technologies and processes. Continuously reviewing and refreshing training content ensures it remains relevant, effective, and compliant.
Collect ongoing feedback from learners and monitor training effectiveness using both qualitative input and data-driven insights. The Whatfix Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) supports this by enabling organizations to gather post-training feedback directly within applications and by tracking user behavior through analytics. These insights help identify areas of friction, knowledge gaps, and underutilized workflows—allowing you to fine-tune your training content to better support employees and improve learning outcomes over time.
Training for the future
Use employee training to instill skills that will promote long-term growth, like AI upskilling and working with automation and advanced analytics. Training in these areas will not only make employees more effective in their current roles but also help them adapt as circumstances and needs evolve, and prepare them for career growth and development.
Challenges in Training Pharma and Life Sciences Employees
Pharma employee training needs to go beyond general workplace training requirements to encompass the unique knowledge and skill areas needed to conduct their work safely and ethically, in compliance with regulations.
Here are some of the unique challenges leaders face when training pharma and life sciences employees, and solutions for overcoming them:
| Challenge | Solution |
| Frequent changes in regulatory requirements make it difficult for managers and L&D teams to keep training updated with the current requirements. | Invest in training and regulatory compliance software with built-in monitoring for regulatory updates and automated content adaptation. Use a DAP to provide embedded workflow support that alerts employees to changes and eliminates compliance risk by guiding end-users through tasks and processes correctly. |
| Training a global workforce of remote employees and teams working across time zones can make it challenging to coordinate training. | Use modern training software like an LMS or DAP to deliver on-demand digital training that automates the delivery of standardized learning content and empowers employees to complete training on a schedule that works for them. |
| Ensuring audit-ready documentation and traceability can be challenging due to high training and performance data volumes, in addition to evolving regulations and standards. | To comply with regulatory requirements and pass audits, L&D teams must keep track of progress and document proof of training completion. Digital training software can automate audit trails and make storing and accessing training documents at a moment’s notice easy. |
| Keeping pace with digital tools and system adoption becomes difficult as technology progresses and departments continue investing in new software. | Use a digital adoption platform that makes it easy to develop and deliver software training content that guides new employees through learning as they interact directly with new digital tools. |
| Lack of personalization in traditional training activities makes keeping learners engaged with learning content challenging. | More than ever, employees need to understand the relevance of their learning. Modern training software can automatically personalize content according to learning preferences, previous experience, and specific roles. DAPs use AI to contextual in-app guidance and user support to employee roles, their location in a task, and their previous actions, helping to provide adaptive, personalized learning experiences to employees at key friction points. |
FAQs
How can pharma companies ensure their training programs are audit-ready?
Ensuring full audit-readiness will require regulation monitoring, continual updating of training content, strong audit trails, and data validation. Team up with compliance or third-party advisors to ensure that training content matches regulatory requirements and make arrangements to receive notifications as regulations change.
Modern compliance software can also help with this problem by automatically integrating new regulations as they change or emerge.
How is digital transformation impacting training in the pharma industry?
Pharmaceutical companies are constantly adopting new technology to drive innovation and
improve operations, whether it’s new sales software or laboratory equipment. As pharma employees use applications like quality management systems and regulatory information management systems to automate tedious tasks and streamline workflows, they gain more time to invest in more challenging work activities and professional development.
How often should employees in pharma be retrained or recertified?
Pharma employees should receive training at least annually, but more frequently if required by regulatory requirements. It is becoming more and more common for organizations to cultivate a culture of continuous learning, in which employees take on smaller training more frequently to increase knowledge retention and improve employee experience.
Ultimately, it is up to business leaders and compliance monitors to determine the most appropriate training or certification frequency for different teams.
How can companies measure the effectiveness of pharma training programs?
From the beginning of the training program development, L&D teams or other stakeholders should establish benchmarks and KPIs that can be tracked through and beyond program implementation. Many L&D tools include robust analytics software that leaders can use to measure training outcomes, paired with overall employee performance data and employee feedback. With these two data streams, leaders can better interpret the effectiveness of training and make program updates based on the results.
Pharma Upskilling and Workflow Support Clicks Better With Whatfix
Pharma companies need well-trained employees to foster innovation and ensure compliance. Whatfix facilitates training for pharma and life sciences to reduce time-to-proficiency on digital tools and workflows.
With Whatfix DAP, leaders can manage and facilitate change adoption with embedded workflow support and self-service experiences for independent issue resolution. Whatfix also supports compliance by maintaining process governance and field validation for clean data. Whatfix Mirror empowers employees with hands-on training in risk-free environments to help them master GxP as they use clinical and quality control software.
Whatfix Analytics helps leaders identify areas of friction and ensure adherence to SOPs, and launch new in-app guidance and support to optimize time-to-completion and reduce user errors.
Learn more about how Whatfix can empower your team – request a free demo today!
