Design or drift?
Analysis of 1,506 Australian pharma field roles, advertised since 2023.
Field commercial and field medical roles, human pharma only.
This describes what companies published in their job advertisements, not what they intended or who they hired.
Same capability, different requirements.
SHARE OF CURRENT ADS NAMING ANY DATA, DIGITAL & AI CAPABILITY
GP commercial figures are thin for AbbVie (2 ads), J&J (3 ads) and Novartis (3 ads) — read with caution.
▲/▼ = a significant move since 2023–24 (confidence interval excludes zero).
Industry generally expects more from specialist reps, and that expectation is growing.
CAPABILITY COUNT, STARTING POINT AND CHANGE, 2023–24 TO 2025–26 · 12 GP-FACING, 20 SPECIALIST-FACING TEAMS
Explore the underlying capability data
Select any of the 61 capabilities to see how its prevalence has changed across field commercial and field medical teams.
Pick a single capability, or a group. For a group the figure is the share of ads specifying any capability in it, so a group always sits at least as high as its strongest member.
The ask
Not a job. A coffee.
I am looking for my next senior marketing or business leadership role in Australian biopharma.
Twenty minutes to introduce myself and hear what you are building.
Let’s connect →Or email me at apcaton at gmail dot com
I’ve run the same analysis on brand and marketing roles. Say the word.
Sydney · Australian biopharma
Methodology & more
This is original analysis, so there is no public page to cite.
What was counted. 4,432 job ads were pulled from 23 Australian pharmaceutical affiliates covering January 2023 to August 2026, and every one was classified and kept. Ads leave the analysis by a stated reason, not by being dropped: 635 are medical devices, 162 animal health and 81 diagnostics, all out of scope here; 292 are duplicate reposts. Of what remains, 1,506 are human pharma field commercial or field medical roles, and those are the ads behind every figure. “Field commercial” rather than “field sales” because only half these ads use the word: Novartis advertises a Portfolio Account Specialist, Roche a Patient Journey Partner, Bayer a Customer Engagement Partner, Pfizer a Health Representative. Each was classified against 61 capabilities in 11 groups, and a capability counts wherever the ad states it, whether under requirements, responsibilities or the role summary.
How accurate it is. Role and sector classification was tested against 217 ads drawn at random across all 23 companies and all four years, labelled by hand from the full ad text before the classifier was run against any of them: 96.8% correct on role, 94.0% on sector, and 95.3% on both for the ads that reach the analysis. Capability detection was checked separately against a sample of 80 mentions: 74% precise on the exact capability, 95% once adjacent capabilities in the same family are allowed.
How a change is claimed. Each team is compared from its own earliest window to its own latest, not from a fixed first year to a fixed last. Windows are two years wide by default and widen only where a team advertised too little to fill them — several affiliates published no field medical ads at all in 2023, so assuming everyone has a 2023 baseline would either invent one or discard the team. Single years were not used either: they swing hard enough to double an apparent movement. No team is dropped for being small. Every team is shown, however few ads stand behind it, and a team with two clean, non-overlapping windows to compare is shown as a change; a team without one is shown as a current position, with no change claimed. A change is only reported once its confidence interval clears zero, so a team with few ads gets a wide interval and, more often than not, no claimed change at all rather than a false one; the market is measured over the same two windows so the comparison stays like-for-like. Every window and ad count is named on the chart and in the tooltip, so the weight behind a figure is never hidden.
What it cannot show. These are advertised roles from one index. Roles filled internally or through search never appear, and one affiliate here advertises so little human pharma field recruitment that nothing can be said about its field model. Ad volume per team runs from one to over a hundred, so some positions carry far more weight than others, which is why the counts sit on every hover. It describes what companies published, not what they intended or who they hired.
The underlying data is available on request and the argument should be checked against it.
Who made this
Anthony Caton. Nineteen years at Amgen, most recently directing a $135 million, three-therapeutic-area commercial organisation as a manager of managers. His career spans multiple product launches in oncology/haematology and other specialty areas, and an MBA from UNSW AGSM completed with high distinction.
AC/08 — a deliberately small awareness campaign to eight Australian pharmaceutical leaders. This is the open version, without the section written for a specific company. Analysis prepared independently by Anthony Caton using published job advertisements.