Career change - Trainee Pharmacy Dispenser?

[Needachange1]

Hi all

I am looking for a career change. I have worked in tax for almost 8 years but have never really loved it and am now really really struggling with working from home. At the same time I want to move from the big city where I currently am to my home city (it is a city but a small city!).

So I’ve been looking at various careers I could do and am quite interested in pharmacy. However, I am 30 and just not sure if I want to commit to 4/5 years at uni at this point in my life. I would have to stay in my current city and commute to another city for classes or move to the other big city. If the uni in my home city offered it it would be fine but sadly they don’t!

I’ve seen a few Trainee Pharmacy Dispenser jobs advertised with a high street pharmacy which look interesting but I’m not too sure what the career prospects are like? Are there any pharmacists/dispensers on here that could help?

The pay for the trainee dispenser says £10/hour, will it go up much more? Money isn’t everything but I currently earn £40k and would like to end up on a salary of around £30k.

A pharmacy dispenser is a busy, pressurised job, and not paid well for the responsibility it entails. I don’t think you end up with 30k unless you end up as a pharmacy manager.

boots job advert

Today I handed in my notice as a dispenser after over 10 years working in pharmacy. It can be a rewarding job if you have lovely patients and a great team - but for the most part it is a thankless, low paid job that comes with a fair amount of pressure from management/patients/ funding cuts/supply issues etc.
After qualifying as a dispenser you could look to train as a technician, then accuracy checking technician, or become a store manager, but there isn’t much progression past that point.
I wouldn’t recommend it!

Former dispenser here. You'll be working in a boring, monotonous job that you know inside out in around 6 month but still have to go through two more years of "training" before you can do the job. Top wage is shit (unlikely to hit £30k), most places pay a little over minimum wage. You will be treated like a child by pharmacists and expected to magic away the patients when the pharmacist decides to go on a go slow, and there is no hope of progression. A lot of pharmacies are "dead men's shoes" when it comes to moving into a management job so don't be fooled into thinking it's a career move, it's a total dead end job.
The only thing I'm glad about is that I didn't waste 4 years at uni studying to do the exact same job as a dispenser, but with my name printed and stuck near the door.

Don't do it. Shit wages for what can be a dangerous job, if I made a mistake with medication and then the pharmacist checking my work also missed it, a person could be dead and me and the pharmacist would both be jobless, potentially in jail and the pharmacist losing their licence to practise pharmacy.

I was on £9.80 an hour last year and that was slightly more than what other places offered) but worked around school runs so I stayed there.

Mostly had decent regular patients but the rising workload and issues sourcing medications in recent years due to Brexit, Ukraine etc and the verbal and physical abuse from some of the general public that walked in started to make me bitter.

I work elsewhere in admin now for 12 quid an hour in a place that actually seems to care about its staff mental health and wouldn't let us take the sort of abuse we had to. They shut that shit down straight away.

How about training to be a hospital pharmacy technician. I believe the starting salary is band 5. I left to go into management at the point I was band 7 so plenty of scope to earn well in a big hospital.

Well that’s that one crossed off the list! Thanks everyone. I do find it crazy that you get paid pretty much the same as a retail assistant!

I was a band 5 hospital pharmacy tech before I retrained.
honestly it’s monotonous and quite unrewarding (hence why I went back to uni and retrained in a different career)
can progress to b6 but opportunities rare and tend to be more management sat at desk all day