What You Need to Know About Crossing from Science to Commercial

I trained as a physician in India and completed residency training in clinical pharmacology. My first industry role was, predictably, in Medical Affairs. Over the years that followed I moved through clinical research, into commercial functions, moved to the US, completed an MBA, advised numerous large and small lifescience companies on commercial and clinical strategy and eventually built a consulting practice at the intersection of life sciences strategy and career development. That trajectory was not planned — it was negotiated, often uncomfortably, against a set of structural realities that revealed themselves along the way. This piece is my attempt to name those realities honestly, for anyone standing at the beginning of a similar journey.

1. Your degree routes you before you have had a chance to choose

The first thing that happens when an MD or PhD enters the biopharma industry is that the industry places them in a box. In most markets — and this is especially pronounced for those coming from less developed economies like India — the available entry points for medically trained professionals are medical affairs and clinical research. Both are valuable and interesting, and both sit squarely within the scientific domain (notwithstanding the field-based nature of some Medical Affairs roles). What they are not is an open gateway to commercial roles. The assumption embedded in the hiring process is that if you have a medical or scientific background, that is where your contribution lies.

Breaking out of that lane later requires showing real aptitude, genuine willingness to start from the ground level in a commercial function, and an appetite for the risk of being seen as a beginner again after years of domain expertise. For those in Western markets, consulting firms have provided an alternative entry route into commercial roles for some time — but that pathway is competitive and coveted and does not change the underlying reality that the majority of scientifically trained professionals still begin in science-adjacent roles and find lateral moves increasingly difficult as careers lengthen. The bucketing happens early and quietly, and most people don't see it until the door they wanted has already narrowed.

2. KPIs feel like liberation — until they don't

I remember distinctly the first time I heard my manager discussing KPIs — and realising that a set of them was being designed for me. Coming from clinical medicine, where the measure of a good day was largely qualitative and often invisible, the idea of having clear, defined metrics felt almost revelatory. Finally, I thought, there would be a transparent way of assessing what I do and being rewarded accordingly. It felt like stepping into a fairer world.

It took several years to understand how wrong that instinct was. KPIs in corporate environments are not neutral instruments of measurement. They are part fences against future litigation and part political artefacts. They reflect what the organisation needs to document, chooses to count, and the way it should be counted, which is not always what it actually values. Performance that is visible, attributable, and easy to quantify gets rewarded, but only when other less measurable yet highly personal factors do not stand in the way. The work that holds everything together — the relationships maintained, the crises quietly averted, the institutional knowledge that prevents the same mistake being made twice — rarely appears on a scorecard. For scientists moving into industry, this is one of the most disorienting realisations: that being excellent at your job and being seen to perform well are related but distinct things and managing the gap between them is a skill nobody teaches you formally.

3. The structure of your day changes more than the pace

The common assumption is that commercial roles move faster than scientific ones. In my experience, pace is not the right frame. What changes is the structure of time itself. In a lab, a clinic, or an academic institution, your day is shaped by the rhythm of the work — experiments have their own logic, patients have their own schedules, research has its own cadence. There is a kind of internal time that governs what you do and when.

Commercial and consulting roles run on calendar time. Your day is structured by meetings, deadlines, client deliverables, and the expectations of people outside your immediate control. The work fills the shape that the diary creates, rather than the other way around. For many scientists this is quietly destabilising in the first months because the relationship between effort and output feels different, and the satisfaction that comes from the natural conclusion of an experiment or a clinical encounter is replaced by something more diffuse and ongoing.

But the deeper shift — and the one that catches most scientifically trained professionals genuinely off guard — is not about time management. It is about people. In a scientific role, your interactions tend to be relatively contained: a lab director, a principal investigator, research associates, a department head, patients, nursing staff. These relationships are real and often meaningful, but they are also largely defined by hierarchy, protocol, or clinical role. The social surface area of the work is bounded.

In commercial roles, that changes fundamentally. Your ability to deliver — whether as an individual contributor or a manager — depends on your capacity to build relationships across functions, manage the expectations of multiple stakeholders simultaneously, communicate with clarity and influence to people who do not share your technical background, and navigate the politics of organisations where competing priorities are the norm rather than the exception. It is part of your job, as much as any analytical or strategic output you produce.

For those who are naturally extroverted and socially fluent, this transition can be energising albeit somewhat risky as it is possible to overcorrect in one direction. For those who are introverted, or who have built successful scientific careers on the strength of their technical output rather than their interpersonal range, it is one of the most demanding recalibrations the move requires. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that in science, introversion is rarely a professional liability — deep focus, independent work, and precise written communication are valued and rewarded. In commercial environments, the ability to read a room, manage upward, negotiate expectations, and sustain collaborative relationships over time is are success-critical soft skills. Developing them is not optional and discovering that earlier rather than later makes a material difference to how the first years of the transition feel.

4. A credential that spans both worlds could change how you are perceived

One of the most striking moments in my own career was the shift in how colleagues and counterparts responded to me after I completed my MBA. The MD alone had placed me in the scientific lane — a credible and respected lane, but a defined one. The MBA alongside it communicated something different: that I could speak multiple professional languages, move across domains, and engage with the commercial and strategic dimensions of the industry without needing translation. Doors that had previously required considerable effort to open became noticeably easier to approach.

What this revealed is something important about how industry, unlike science, works: perception of capability often precedes demonstrated capability. In research, you earn credibility through output. In commercial environments, credibility is partly signalled through the shorthand of what you have done, where you have been, and what your profile communicates before you have said a word. Understanding this different operating logic and learning to manage your professional profile as deliberately as you once managed your research output, is one of the less discussed but more important skills of the transition.

5. You may grieve the identity you are leaving behind — or you may not, and that tells you something too

Moving from a scientific role into commercial is, among other things, an identity transaction. The singular expert identity — being the person who knows more about this specific thing than almost anyone else in the room — does not travel intact into a commercial function. The scientific identity is not just a professional label. For many it is the organising principle of a life, the thing that answers the question of who you are and why your work matters. For some people, losing it is genuinely difficult.

For others — and I count myself in this group — the release of that singular identity is more liberating than it is painful. If you do not find fulfilment in mastering a single set of skills and ascending steadily through a defined role hierarchy, the breadth and variety of commercial work can feel like oxygen. The question worth sitting with before you make the move is an honest one: do you derive your sense of professional self from depth and mastery, or from variety and connection? Neither answer is better than the other. But the answer shapes everything about whether the transition will feel like an expansion or a diminishment and knowing which you are before you make the jump is considerably more useful than discovering it after.

6. Geographic mobility has a window that can close before you realise it existed

This point is directed particularly at professionals from developing countries and other markets where the biopharma industry is growing but the commercial infrastructure remains less developed than in the US, UK, or Western Europe. If the ability to build a career in a more developed market is something you want, the path you choose early matters enormously, and timing matters almost as much.

If you are at a stage in your life where returning to university is still viable, a research Master's degree taken in the country of your choice is one of the most reliable routes to establishing yourself in that market. The combination of local credentials, a local network, and work visa options available to researchers opens doors that an equivalent qualification from a different country often cannot. If that window has passed and you are beyond the point of wanting to go back to full-time education, then getting onto a commercial track as early as possible is the more powerful move. Commercial skills, client relationship experience, and strategic consulting exposure travel across markets with considerably more fluidity than specialist scientific credentials. The scientist who has spent a decade working in academic institutions in a less developed country may find their credentials undervalued or outright dismissed when attempting to move to a more developed country. The commercial professional with equivalent experience faces a different and generally more navigable set of barriers.

7. The roles that helped scientists cross over are quietly disappearing

For many years, the bridge between scientific and commercial careers ran through a set of structured, process-driven industry roles — positions in medical information, regulatory submissions, pharmacovigilance, and similar functions that offered scientists a foothold in industry without requiring them to immediately demonstrate commercial instincts. These roles were reliable, well-defined, and provided the institutional exposure that made lateral moves into commercial functions possible over time.

Many of these roles are among the most directly exposed to AI-driven automation. Regimented, repetitive, process-intensive work is precisely what current AI tools are being designed to perform, and the life sciences industry is not exempt from that displacement. This does not mean those roles will vanish overnight, but it does mean that relying on them as a stable stepping stone is a riskier strategy than it was a decade ago. The implication for anyone planning the transition from scientific to commercial work is that the window for using those bridge roles as a deliberate crossing point may be narrowing, and the case for moving more directly and more quickly onto a commercial track has strengthened.

The honest question underneath all of this

The practical observations in this piece matter — the credential dynamics, the KPI disillusionment, the geographic timing, the AI exposure of bridge roles. But underneath all of them is a question that is worth asking before any of the tactics become relevant: what kind of professional life do you actually want to build?

The move from R&D into commercial is not inherently an upgrade. For some people it is exactly the right move at exactly the right time — a release from a constraining lane into something with more variety, more connection, and more room to build something that feels distinctly their own. For others, it extracts the very thing that makes work meaningful: the depth, the mastery, the clarity of a problem with a knowable answer. Helping you understand which kind of person you are is the most practically valuable thing I can offer.