FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What if I’m not sure coaching is for me?

Your situation is unique. Our approach to finding a great new job will match your needs. Our Happy Pharmacists Coaches discuss your career, your goals, and the things that are extremely important to you. Coaching is designed to uncover your priorities by asking you deep and powerful questions. You will leave each session with action steps to move you toward your expressed goals.

How much does it cost to get a coach?

General career coaching can cost anywhere, from on a very low end, $100 an hour to on the high end, $1000 an hour, depending on the industry and the level of expertise. We treat ourselves very much like a boutique agency because we focus only on helping pharmacists. As such, we have research, training, and development to help pharmacists only and thus charge higher than a low-end generalist career coach. 

We are a pharmacist coach company. We do not reimburse our pharmacists. We value our pharmacists as experts and compensate them appropriately. If you’re here and you want an indispensable career, then you too want to be compensated well.

How will working with a coach help me to get a job?

A coach is a change expert who helps pharmacists take responsibility for their lives and act to maximize their own potential. A coach works with you to help you make your job desires a current reality. If you want to start or grow a business, we make that happen. If you want a new job, we help guide you to that. If you’ve been trying for any amount of time to find a job you love or applying to a job and not made success, a coach reverse engineers your desire through small baby steps that make a big change over time. 

A coach believes in you by listening. Coaching is many things, but the core of a coach is to believe in the potential of people. 

A coach isn’t a mentor because a mentor can only tell you what worked for them, and you will never be another person. A coach looks deep within you, asking powerful questions to unlock what makes you different from everyone else and help you craft a story that makes you a compelling standout candidate.

Coaching is a relationship-based, goal driven and centered around you. A coach helps you set goals you want to meet. A coach doesn’t enforce a list of to-dos that don’t help you accomplish your life’s vision. 

What is coaching exactly?

We may be able to easily find a job for you in our journey, but job could mean moving halfway across the United States, which you may not want to do. Every pharmacist situation is unique. Our program works you through the journey of defining a new career path, creating the strategy to make the transition, and the skills, tools, and tricks necessary to transition. So what happens if you don’t get the job at the end of our coaching program? We continue to serve you. This usually means that we give you continued access to our content library that provides you with step-by-step tricks and you remain in contact with your coach to support your concerns and questions. So when you have your next interview, you can access all of our modules in preparation for the interview. We also offer other services such as mock interviews, job, and benefits salary negotiation after the 3 month coaching commitment. Your coach also maintains contact with you through our online platforms that help hold you accountable for doing weekly tasks so that you don’t lose your momentum. 

Tell me about the contract obligations.

We provide seven coaching sessions with our clients. The first session is a kick-off session to plan the next three months. Each following session goes over the steps necessary to complete the plan of a transition. Canceling within twenty-four hours prior to the coaching event can only be done once, and thereafter you lose coaching sessions. Coaching sessions can be rescheduled with your coach, as long as it is done before the twenty-four hours period elapses or whatever our policy is.

You have lifetime access to our content library, which is constantly being updated by our team as well as reviewed by hiring pharmacy managers. You have unlimited access to our coaches, that is, which gives you the opportunity to communicate with them whenever you share your wins, struggles, and victories.

Who have you helped in the past?

Take a look at the list of companies and different sectors we have helped pharmacists get into here. As well as our success stories of pharmacists who made transitions here.

What's the difference between coaching and a recruiter?

Here are a few things a recruiter does:

  • A recruiter is paid for the best candidate and based on the salary of the position. 
  • A recruiter doesn’t care for your well-being,  or whether or not you are a match, or if they should give you a shot. 
  • Recruiters care about finding the best person for the job because they care about making money. 
  • They may say they will give you a shot, but, ultimately, if they don’t have a job that matches exactly what you’ve done in the past, making you the best candidate for the future, they are not going to give you a shot.

A coach does nothing of this sort. A coach helps you unlock your potential to find and get you into a great career. You have unique gifts and abilities; you’re a pharmacist. You have so much potential, and we help unlock people’s potential through the power of coaching, listening powerfully, and asking the right questions to help you shift the way you think about your candidacy to turn you into a standout candidate, confident in your application. 

What kind of qualification to coach does my coach have?

We have our training and certification program, where we help pharmacists train under our current coaches and meet our very specific guidelines to qualify as a coach. We are currently seeking the International Coaching Federation (ICF) certification. All coaches report to our lead coach, Jackie Boyle, who is also the Assistant Dean at NEOMED University. Also, phone calls between coaches and clients are reviewed to ensure quality. As proof of the excellent services we offer, in 2020 our satisfaction rating was 95% according to our clients.

Does the coach share their network with me, or do I need to build my own?

Your network is your net worth. 

Networking is one of the great assets of building an indispensable career. Each coach has a network of thousands and thousands of connections. We are willing and able to introduce you to people.

For example, one client we worked with started up her own non-profit pharmacy. We were able to connect her with three different pharmacists that had done that very same thing and had helped her grow her pharmacy. But know that the coaches reserve the right to decide on who they may introduce to you. Also, recognize that your network is more valuable to you than our network because your network knows you and not us, whereas our network knows us.

How much time do I need to commit weekly?

If you believe your body is worth investing in, you’ll spend time, money, and energy exercising regularly to maintain your health. If you believe your career, job satisfaction, and well-being is worth it, you will dedicate time as well to that endeavor. 

If you work full-time, looking for another job can feel like a part-time job. What we like to recommend to the pharmacists we work with is to dedicate a few hours every week to take small baby steps towards a new career. Of course, if you dedicate more time, five to ten hours a week, this could be beneficial. But in working with us, we want to prevent you from wasting time on activities that don’t yield results. 

A good estimation of time to commit is somewhere between two to four hours a week. This could look like spending thirty minutes in the morning, checking emails and communications, watching a module or two in our program, and meeting with your coach. Or it could be spending four hours on your day off doing your coaching calls and the other tasks.

If I work with you, how long until long I can get the job I want?

You are not going to like the answer; it varies. 

Every pharmacist we work with is unique and is looking for a different opportunity. Some want to create brand new businesses, many want a new pharmacy career, and others want to transition to entirely different careers outside of pharmacy, and some want to make a simple shift into a different company but similar role. So, everyone’s journey will be different. 

We’ve helped people get jobs within one month, whereas others take more time, up to six to nine months. The truth is that you probably have been looking for a new job for some time and haven’t found success. And I understand that you may feel like you want a new job urgently. But understand that we don’t guarantee a job by a certain time because we don’t want you to accept the first job that comes along; we want you to accept the best job for you. This means applying an indispensable strategy to build a career that will allow you to transition to your next job even easier because you’ve built the skills necessary to transition.

Do I need a coach?

A pharmacist once asked me this question, and I asked, “Why do you think you need a coach?” She responded with a list of the reasons why a coach would help her. I replied, “No one needs a coach.” She remained quiet, probably a shocked look on her face but this was over the phone, but I waited for a response. She finally said, “What do you mean? You’re a coach, aren’t you?”

I told her that I have two coaches right now, but I didn’t need them, I wanted them. The people who work with us understand how much I believe in coaching when they hear I’ve invested over $80,000 in my own coaches. If you want to increase your impact, effectiveness, and success, then you may want a coach.

What resources do you have that I cannot find myself for free?

There are thousands of articles written online about pharmacy, career paths, and, of course, how to navigate the job market. Here’s what you are not going to be able to find that is exclusive to us; 

  • We have a team of over ten pharmacist career coaches with a combined a hundred and fifty years of pharmacy experience. 
  • Twenty-plus years of pharmacist career and business coaching unique to us.
  • Academic research compiled into a library and system to navigate the job market successfully. 
  • The adage “Knowledge is power” is false. Everyone knows how to lose weight, but few people actually take action to do it. Our coaches are certified by our training program to help you turn the knowledge you might be learning for free or through us and turn that into action.

Free advice is valuable as what it is; ‘free”. If you’ve been looking online for free advice, has any of that been helpful? Has that information been significantly helpful to you to help you transition? You can continue getting free advice from mentors who will only give you their perception of what worked for them but realize their free advice worked for them, and it may or may not work for you. Our coaches are trained to help you take your situation and turn it around into a transition story, using your unique gifts strategy and help you overcome any roadblocks that are on your path. 

Do you help pharmacists leave pharmacy, or do you help them find another job or something else?

Many pharmacists feel betrayed by the profession and wonder if they should leave it behind; this is not our mission. Many pharmacists come to us first considering leaving but ultimately end up staying. About 95% of our clients end up finding a job within pharmacy that they absolutely love near their previous pay or higher. 

But some do decide to leave the profession. Regardless of what the client wants, we help them make a road map to their desired destination. We’ve helped pharmacists become financial advisors, comedians, entrepreneurs, health consultants, non-profit founders, etc. If you wonder if pharmacy isn’t for you, we’ve got you covered.

What if I don’t want to stay in Pharmacy?

This is totally understandable and relatable. The founder of The Happy PharmD, Alex Barker, felt the same way after becoming burned out as a clinician. We all have these moments. That’s why the first goal of our coaching program is to truly understand where you want to go next. 

What we’ve found over and over again is that many pharmacists find something else that they absolutely love doing while still working as a pharmacist. But if that can’t be done, we help pharmacists rediscover a new career path where they are invigorated using the skills they’ve learned and used as a pharmacist to help them transition into a new career.

Start Your Indispensable Career Journey Today!

Not sure where to start or what you need to get a better job and career? By completing The Happy PharmD Career Assessment you will be connected with a Happy PharmD Career Advisor to help you choose a coaching program based on your skills, interests, and passions, find jobs that match your uniqueness, and become a top candidate.