Salary expectations - biotech / pharmaceuticals

Hello all,

First post and nice to see a community of English-speakers in Germany. Right, I read a thread here on if pharma is evil which was very entertaining so I thought I'd ask here my question as some seem to have experience of the biotech/pharma industry in Germany. Anyway getting to the point, I'm a fresh PhD in Bioinformatics/Cheminformatics (i work with software to design drugs) and I'm currently in a salary negotiation situation. Background is that I'm a 26 single male (read here marital status has something to do with salary?! If I can get more money by being married and there are any laid-back single women out there wanting to do a mutually beneficail deal then I'm open for negotiation ) that has a masters and now PhD. So my question is how does the salary in the pharma/biotech industry in Germany relate to the English market. I know how much I would like in England, which is around 30k sterling, but have no idea what is reasonable in Germany?

The company is in the NRW region and the position is a pre-sales/support scientist role at a company which employs 16 people and has been in business for 5 years. They also state they are highly profitable in their ad for the job, hmmmmm whats that suppposed to mean in a job ad?!

Anyone out there in the know?

Any help would be great, cheers!

Hi Medicine Man,

I have no idea what a pharmaceuticals pre-sales position pays; I imagine quite well, but the exact number is unknown to me. Main reason I'm posting is to give your question a bit of a bump. But you might have to wait until Monday to get any answers...

Well there has been a development, after my phone interview I was asked to think about it and then send them my expected salary range. Is this common practice in Germany for people to state a range that they would expect? They asked for a salary range in the application, but i just said standard market rates. How much bearing does this have on generally who would be chosen for a job in Germany and are German companies open to lots of negotiation like in UK/USA? (or are they first-offer best offer types) Do you think I should play the stupid card, say that I'm from England don't know the Germany market/system and wouldn't be able to say (I did already say this on the phone to them, which is how I honestly feel). Thus wait for what they offer me? This is my first job so I'm new to this and the German mentality!

Cheers

minimum salaray for a first job with a biotech related PhD should be €40K or over in Germany. However, in many companies that is higher particularly in the fields of bioinformatics and chemoinformatics where the companies have revenue streams and are less under the kosh of VC backers.

Germany has a particularly strong place in the world of bioinformatics:

http://www.bioinfo.de/isb/2002/02/0015/main.html

Lion Bioscience is one of the biggest players in the world of bioinformatics and is headquartered in Heidelberg. Epigenomics, another German company, recently had an IPO. Other players include MWG Biotech and Genomatix Software while companies like Bayer, Roche and many other pharma companies based in Germany have bioinformatics and chemoinformatics divisions.

My experience with German Biotech companies is that they pay about half of what you would earn in the US and about 70-80% of what you would earn in the U.K. However, they can put together a nice package. As this is your first position out of school I would suggest not worrying about your salary. Get your foot in the door and gain some industry experience. Then in a few years you will be much more marketable. But I would be surprised if you were offered a salary over 45K. But a sales position could be a lot more. So I don't know exactly what you refer to with pre-sales as a description.

Welcome. I've worked at two biotechs here in Munich and would imagine that you could command a salary in the 50-60k region (which is what fresh PhDs commanded at my first company, which was VC funded). IMHO, it's as easy as multiplying your UK expectations by the requisite conversion rate and adjusting for the difference in cost of living. As a recent PhD in the UK with I'm guessing no experience of a commercial environment, I'd guess that 30k GBP is probably at the limit of what you could expect. Multiply that by 1.5 and add some on for the cost of living here (which after 4 years, I still find higher than in the UK but I'm sure some on here will disagree and why not). And voilà, the amount in Euros. The job sounds like you'd be backup to the sales/BD folk explaining how the product(s) they offer work, no? Good luck with the negotiations and hopefully success if you take the job. As it could be a sales-related post, it may be a basic + commission type deal. Previous posters comments about not worrying too much on the pay front are great advice. Get your foot in the door, see if the country, culture, people and language are for you and jump ship as and when necessary. I'm already contemplating moving to my third biotech in four years just for the experience.

Hi guys and gals,

Thanks for your help and here is an update. I got offered the job and after stating a salary range of 40-45K i got my first offer of 40k basic and a 5K performance related and company related success bonus. However after reading about how much tax you guys pay over in Germany I'm starting to think that I might have asked for too little. In comparison to what i would get in the UK and taxed alot less. Do you think I should ask for more? With this reasoning of not knowing the tax system when i asked? I'm thinking about relocation costs and asking them to help me out with that. Also would like them to throw in some German lessons. Also what is the normal amount of holiday that people get?

I appreciate what people say about don't worry about the money but hey everyone wants as much as possible and this PhD drove me to poverty! I also know that they picked me from 40 other people, jesus unemployment is really that bad out there.

Ohh and mulah yeah your right about what i would be doing, small company so it would be varied with supporting the products and liasing with customers to obtain better sales revenue. The problem with jumping ship when neccessary is that there are only about 10 companies that sell specifically this type of software. But I suppose with the experience i gain I could jump to lots of software sales positions.

Is that netto or brutto? (after taxes and before respectively)

Before taxes! Netto would have made me a very happy chappy.

Throw your brutto amount into this German tax calculator and it will calculate your take home pay:

http://www.parmentier.de/steuer/incometax.htm

thanks a bunch for that tax calculator! I understand if its just a ballpark figure though it still helpfull if your german is level 0