Pros
Novartis is a place where if you work hard and play the political games there are significant opportunities. It is a growing company with a strong research and development pipeline. The people, by and large, are good, honest and hard working. Novartis has previously invested significantly in training and development programs for its staff and if you push yourself there are many career development pathways to follow. They have a history in niche product portfolio's and have shown they have the ability to launch products with reasonable success. Sadly Australia is far from the thoughts of global leaders of the company and currently the PEC appears to be out of contact with their customers and employees - they talk a great deal about being externally focussed but in reality they are a company that is overly internally focussed and bureaucratic with massive administration load for sales people the focus making "Big Brother" reporting the priority.
Cons
Honesty and integrity are not the strong points of some of the senior leadership and unfortunately there is a large number of people wanting to make it too the top no matter what the consequences. They have significant medicines australia compliance issues and a culture in management of what can I get away with rather than what is in accordance with the code of conduct. The approach is very bureaucratic and report driven so much so that I would say 40% of a sales reps time is caught up in administrative tasks - for which there is no support as there are no state offices or home office allowances. They operate under the motto of do "more with less" and pay rates are below industry standards when compared to global organisations of a similar size.
