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We’re resharing this conversation from 2023. The career questions in it haven’t aged, and it’s one we come back to often when people ask us how to think about their next move in regulatory affairs or quality.
Nobody grows up dreaming of a career in RA/QA. Most people, as Nick puts it, tripped and fell into it. And then they hit the industry’s opening paradox: you need pharma experience to get in, but you can’t get the experience until you’re already in.
Once you’re in, the questions don’t stop. Nick Capman sat down with Jessica Beaver, a regulatory and quality executive with over 20 years in the industry, to work through the ones people ask most in the first and second halves of their careers. Should I specialize or stay broad? Big company or startup? Stay a contributor or move into management? Go independent, or even start my own thing?
Jessica started as a pharmacist during graduate school, moved into large pharma as a contributing scientist on product development teams, and shifted into regulatory and then quality about halfway through her career. She’s worked across both pharma and medical device, from a seven-plus-year run at Targacept through executive roles at Kowa Pharmaceuticals and, most recently, as President and CEO of the medical device startup Verinetics.
Her throughline advice is simpler than any single answer: spend real time figuring out what you actually want, then make the move.
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Jessica’s key insights and practical takeaways
If you’re short on time, here are the most important lessons from the discussion.
Specialist or generalist comes down to what you actually like doing. Early in an RA career you often don’t get to choose. You start in a therapeutic area or molecule type and build depth there by default. The real question comes later: stay deep or broaden out. Jessica frames it as a genuine tradeoff, not a right answer. Specializing makes you knowledgeable and sought after. The cost is fragility, because work environments aren’t stable, and deep specialization makes a pivot harder. She leans generalist herself because she likes solving different kinds of problems and thinks of the work as puzzles. So ask yourself what you like: diving deep into one thing, or solving broadly across many. Nick’s shorthand for the choice is the laser versus the Swiss Army knife.
If you specialize, pick a niche with longevity. Jessica’s one caution for anyone going deep is to watch where the niche is headed. Nick’s example is radiopharmaceuticals, small but not necessarily shrinking, against his tongue-in-cheek image of specializing in buggy whips in the 1930s. Neither could name a current specialty they’d call a bad bet, which is the point. The move isn’t to avoid specializing. It’s to keep your head up, track where therapeutics and investment are flowing, and specialize in something durable rather than whatever’s hottest right now.
Stay current without drowning in information. The industry has more blogs, newsletters, and podcasts than anyone can follow, to the point of being overwhelming. Jessica’s advice is to pick a small number of sources, ask a mentor or supervisor what they actually read, and protect a little time each day for it, at lunch, before the day starts, whenever fits. Consistency beats volume.
The generalist path buys flexibility, with a real catch. A generalist is adaptable and can tackle many kinds of problems, which is valuable in consulting and in small organizations that change tactics fast. The downside mirrors the specialist’s advantage: some employers want a specialist with existing FDA contacts for a specific area, and a broad background can read as not deep enough for them.
Large companies teach you how the industry actually works. Jessica’s case for big pharma is education. You see specialists across CMC, clinical, and nonclinical, meet a lot of people, and get learning opportunities everywhere. For a regulatory professional who has to advise colleagues across all those functions, that exposure is hard to replicate. She spent the first part of her career there and values what it taught her, even though she hasn’t gone back. Nick adds that large companies tend to suit people focused on climbing the ladder, with the tradeoff being bureaucracy and personalities.
Big doesn’t mean stable. Both push back on the stability myth. Large companies feel more stable, and are, until a wave of layoffs hits, and Nick notes the last decade has been more volatile than the one before it. A large employer is not a job for life.
Startups give a regulatory professional room to shape the whole company. Jessica is openly a lover of startups at this stage of her career, and her metaphor is the best in the episode. In a large company, the people running alongside you toward success are close on either side. In a small company, the distance between you and the next person is much wider, which means there’s room to do more. A regulatory professional at a startup can influence the whole company’s success, not just a team’s, because so much of a company’s fate runs through regulatory, the stories you tell and how you assemble the information to get a candidate through the gauntlet. The risk is the obvious one: a startup can collapse when things don’t work out, with no broad portfolio to cushion the fall. Jessica’s answer is that the experience is still worth it, and you can carry what you learned into the next thing.
Nick’s pull toward startups comes down to three things. You wear a lot of hats, which broadens your experience the way generalist work does. There’s financial upside if you can negotiate equity, phantom stock, or options and the company succeeds. And you get to be part of a story, going from an idea to an established brand, which he finds genuinely exciting and useful to carry forward. He also makes a point about stress worth repeating: on a scale of one to ten, a two or three is healthy, three to five is manageable, above five is probably too much, and below two means you’re not growing. Startups can deliver the useful kind.
Small molecule or large, pharma or device, folds back into specialist versus generalist. Jessica notes that even the RA certification exams have shifted, from a regional, generalist approach spanning devices and pharma to a recognition that people now tend to work in one area rather than across. Her advice doesn’t change: go with what you feel called toward, whether that pull is scientific, problem-solving, or personal, like a therapeutic area that matters because of a family member. No area carries an inherent advantage. Principally the work is the same, building a story to tell toward a regulatory approval.
Moving from contributor to manager deserves real discernment, not reflex. Nick opens with his own story. His first job out of college, the hiring manager said he could become a manager within twelve months. He did it in eleven, because it looked like growth and he saw no reason not to. He was also removed from the role within three to six months, which he says was the right call. Jessica names the shift people underestimate: as a contributor you gauge productivity by what you produce, a report, a successful FDA meeting. As a people manager, what you’re producing is people, and you can’t point to that in a performance review the way you’d point to a finished deliverable. It takes time, the people depend on you, and it’s a real change in how you think and spend your time.
Being good at the work doesn’t make you good at managing. Nick’s addition is that a great baseball player isn’t automatically a great manager. Management is a separate skill set you have to learn. He also reframes the hierarchy: a contributor has one boss, a manager has many, and if you’re doing it well, you work for the people who report to you, not the other way around. Both reach for Kim Scott’s rock star versus superstar framing from Radical Candor. The rock star wants to stay an individual contributor in their space. The superstar wants to climb. Neither is better, and a good hiring manager figures out which someone is instead of assuming everyone wants to climb.
Listen to the people in your care instead of pushing your idea of advancement on them. Jessica closes the management section with something that’s stayed with her for twenty years. Early on, as a team lead, someone asked her why she thought everyone should have to advance or go back to school. She wasn’t saying that, but it was landing that way. The lesson she took, and still carries, is to actually listen to the people she leads rather than push them toward her own definition of advancement.
Going independent means giving up being part of something. Nick flags consulting as his world and teases a whole future episode on it. The core tradeoff Jessica names is belonging. As a full-time employee you’re on the team, invested in a shared goal. As a consultant you can still feel that sometimes, but often you’re viewed as someone who helps rather than part of the deeper, invested team. It also loops back to specialist versus generalist: you need to know what you bring. A specialist consultant needs clients who need that specialty. A generalist has more flexibility in who they can help, with the same catch, they may not be the first choice when a client wants deep experience in one thing. And there’s real financial risk, since consulting has an ebb and flow. Jessica points to the shift from the busy early-COVID stretch into a slower period as a reminder that independents have to watch the market and plan for their own stability.
Underneath all of it: spend time discerning where you want to go. Asked for closing lessons, Jessica returns to her theme. Her book recommendation is Marcus Buckingham’s Love and Work, which she keeps going back to. Its argument, in her telling, is that you don’t need to love what you do every second, but you do need to love it generally, because you spend so much of your life working. She reads by listening first, then returns to a hard copy with a notebook to pull out what matters, for professional and personal growth alike. Her parting advice is to stay flexible. She thinks about what she wanted to be as a child, which isn’t where she landed, and tells her teenager the same thing she’d tell an early-career professional: it’s the journey, not the destination. Set goals, because they matter for growth, but you may hit them faster than expected and then have to ask what’s next, so keep looking around at the opportunities that could take you somewhere you didn’t plan.
Guard your wellbeing, and build systems rather than chasing goals. Nick complements Jessica’s advice with a push on wellbeing. You spend more time with colleagues than family, so if you’re waking up with a case of the Mondays every day, you’re losing years and the ability to live well within them. Make a change. He also offers an unpopular opinion on goals: he focuses less on the goal and more on the systems, processes, and habits that put him in position to reach it. His analogy comes from Danny Ainge, that you can’t control the scoreboard, only your position to influence it. So he builds systems and holds himself accountable across the things that feed the work, when he wakes up, how he manages stress and mental health, how he keeps learning, and the relationships and sense of purpose outside the job that shape performance inside it.
One thing to bring back to your team
Block an hour this week to answer one question honestly: what do you actually want your next move to be, and why?
Nearly every fork in this episode, specialist or generalist, big or small, contributor or manager, employee or independent, comes down to the same thing. There’s no universally right answer, only the one that fits who you are and where you want to go. Most people skip the discernment and let momentum or a hiring manager’s challenge decide for them. The professionals who end up happy are usually the ones who spent the time.
Jessica Smith Beaver, PhD, is a pharmaceutical and medical device executive with over 20 years of experience across all stages of R&D. She began her career in clinical pharmacology focused on translational medicine, then moved into regulatory affairs and quality, and has since led regulatory strategy, quality systems implementation, and healthcare compliance across therapeutic areas including CNS, rheumatology, gastroenterology, women's health, oncology, and wound healing, with FDA interactions spanning CDER, CDRH, and CBER. She spent nearly eight years at Targacept in roles from clinical pharmacokinetics scientist to Senior Director of Regulatory Affairs and Quality Compliance, led regulatory and quality at KeraNetics, and served as Vice President of Regulatory and Business Operations at Kowa Pharmaceuticals America. Most recently she was Chief Regulatory Officer and then President and CEO of Verinetics, a medical device startup developing DispenSecur, an electronic lockbox to support take-home methadone access for people in treatment for opioid use disorder.
Connect with Jessica on LinkedIn here.
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