To bring our purpose to life: breakthroughs that change patients' lives, we must continually grow and support those around us to do the same. Focusing on growth will help us to produce medicines and vaccines that could completely change the course of a disease. Growth is intrinsic to us all as human beings: we are constantly evolving. At Pfizer, putting this into practice means promoting equal growth opportunities for all our colleagues. We believe that growth doesn’t always have to be linear and instead, can be a collection of wide-ranging and unique experiences. Our Growth and Talent Strategy promotes individual colleague growth, encourages career path development, and fosters a culture of collective talent ownership.

We believe that non-linear growth is important, enabling our colleagues to explore different roles and experiences has many benefits. By encouraging our colleagues to pursue roles across a variety of teams and functions, we engender professionals with unique knowledge and broad-minded perspectives.

At Pfizer we’re proud to promote incremental growth in a role as well as mobility across horizontal, diagonal, or vertical paths. We provide our colleagues with support to tailor their growth around what they want from their career, to achieve their potential and help us deliver our purpose.  

 

Setting a common language for growth

We have established a common language for growth across our business to promote meaningful and effective conversations between colleagues and their managers. This common language helps to foster non-linear or ‘zig-zag’ growth for our colleagues.

For example, a colleague may want to ‘Grow in Role’. This means they are concentrating on being the best they can be in their current position and building a stronger foundation in this area. Or perhaps, they are looking for the ‘Next Experience’. This includes the desire to employ the knowledge they have in their current role and develop it in a new role or project to widen their expertise. For some, exploring a totally new side of the business with a ‘Cross-Functional’ change is essential for growth and for others, taking a position with greater responsibility and challenge helps them grow to the ‘Next Level’.
 

How we grow ourselves

To kickstart their growth journey, we encourage our colleagues to have regular conversations with their managers, using this growth language as a starting point. This means we can help to facilitate each person’s current needs and ambitions for the future whilst inspiring operational growth to make Pfizer a great working environment.

Deciding on a direction of growth is individual to us all but if a colleague is motivated, they will be supported by their manager and the wider organisation.