TLDR: Omnichannel in life sciences is an operating model rather than a campaign format, and it stalls in the org chart more often than in the technology. Five concrete role families carry it, and most commercial teams currently staff two of them.
Omnichannel programmes stall in the org chart more often than in the technology
The word travels loosely through commercial life sciences, attached to everything from a coordinated email programme to a full customer-experience redesign. Underneath the vocabulary sits a specific and demanding proposition: engaging healthcare professionals through field, digital, medical and event touchpoints as one connected relationship rather than several parallel campaigns. Organisations that treat this as a programme with an end date consistently underperform organisations that treat it as a permanent operating model with named owners. The looseness of the term is itself part of the problem, since a word that covers both a newsletter and a redesign lets a steering committee approve one and believe it has funded the other.
The distinction shows up in how decisions get made. A campaign has a budget, a launch and a close, so its coordination requirements end when it ships. An operating model changes standing questions: who decides what a customer receives next, who arbitrates when two brands want the same audience in the same week, who owns the definition of an engaged physician. Those questions recur weekly and are settled by structure. Where no structure answers them, they get settled by whoever escalates hardest, which produces exactly the incoherent experience the investment was meant to fix. Escalation as a decision mechanism also selects systematically for the loudest brand rather than the most important customer, so the resulting incoherence has a consistent shape rather than a random one.
Technology selection absorbs disproportionate attention because it is the most tractable part of the problem. A platform decision has vendors, demonstrations and a defensible business case, whereas redistributing decision rights across brand teams, field leadership, medical affairs and IT has none of those and creates visible losers. Organisations therefore reach for the procurable answer, and the platform arrives into an unchanged operating model where it automates the existing fragmentation efficiently. The capability gap survives the purchase intact. Worse, the purchase consumes the political energy that the harder change required, so the organisation emerges with a better system, an unchanged structure and a widespread belief that omnichannel has already been addressed.
What separates the teams that make it work is unglamorous and repeatable. They name an owner for the end-to-end customer experience, give that owner authority over sequencing rather than only over digital channels, and define what good looks like in terms of sustained relationship quality instead of per-channel response. The technology then serves a decision structure that already exists, which is the order in which these implementations tend to succeed. Defining success at relationship level does most of the work, because a measure that spans channels makes cross-channel trade-offs visible and therefore arguable. Naming an owner is the first step, and staffing the capability underneath that owner requires knowing which distinct jobs the model actually generates.
Five role families carry the model, and commercial teams typically staff only two
Omnichannel decomposes into five recognisable jobs. They exist in every functioning implementation regardless of what the titles say locally, and where one is unstaffed the work does not disappear — it lands on someone unsuited to it, usually the brand manager, who absorbs it alongside a full existing role. Identifying which families you already hold is a faster diagnostic than any maturity assessment. It is also more honest, because a maturity model scores the process an organisation describes, while a role audit exposes the work that is actually happening and the person quietly doing it in the evenings.
The orchestrator owns the coordinated journey. Their week consists of sequencing decisions, arbitration between brand and field priorities, and holding the plan when a channel owner wants to break it for a local metric. The position needs enough seniority to overrule a brand manager and enough system understanding to know what the platform can actually execute. Appointing someone junior to this role is a common and expensive error, because the job is almost entirely about influence over people who do not report to them. Seniority substitutes here for formal authority that the org chart rarely grants, and where neither is present the orchestrator becomes an administrator of decisions other people have already made elsewhere.
Martech specialists and content operations supply the machinery. The martech role runs the CRM, campaign and consent tooling at configuration level, which makes them the person who knows why an audience segment behaves unexpectedly and whether a personalisation rule is safe. Content operations produces and adapts approved material at the pace coordination demands, working in modular components so that a single approved claim can serve six channel variants without six separate review cycles. That modular discipline is what makes the review burden survivable at omnichannel volumes. The arithmetic is unforgiving: review capacity is fixed by the availability of medical and legal reviewers, so a content model that multiplies review events by channel count caps the programme long before budget does.
Analytics and field-digital hybrids close the loop from either end. The analytics role converts engagement signals into a defensible recommendation about the next action for a given customer, which requires understanding why the underlying data is imperfect as much as processing it. Field-digital hybrids — representatives and medical staff who move fluently between an in-person conversation and a digital follow-up — are the family most often overlooked in workforce planning, and the one where existing employees most readily grow into the requirement with structured support. The oversight happens because these hybrids hold no new job title, so a workforce plan built from requisitions never sees them, and the capability is assumed to arrive with the platform.
| Role family | Owns | Most common hiring mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Orchestrator | The coordinated journey and sequencing decisions | Appointed too junior to arbitrate across brands |
| Martech specialist | CRM, campaign and consent configuration | Placed in IT, far from commercial intent |
| Content operations | Compliant modular content at channel pace | Scoped as production capacity, not as a content model |
| Analytics | Engagement data to next-best-action | Hired for modelling depth over commercial judgement |
| Field-digital hybrid | Continuity between in-person and digital contact | Assumed rather than developed and measured |
Scarcity comes from the intersection these roles occupy, not from any single skill in them
Each competence these roles require is individually available in the market. Marketing technologists exist in volume. So do analysts, content operations managers and experienced pharmaceutical representatives. The shortage is specific to the combination, and understanding why it formed explains why it will persist for several years rather than resolving through ordinary supply response. Markets clear scarcity by paying more for a known profile until supply responds, and that mechanism works only where a training route exists to respond with. Here the profile is produced by career history rather than by qualification, so raising the salary raises competition for a fixed population without adding anyone to it.
Career structures produced the gap. Commercial organisations in life sciences historically advanced people within a discipline: brand marketers grew into senior brand roles, field staff into field management, IT specialists into systems ownership. Progression rewarded depth, and lateral moves between these tracks were treated as detours that cost momentum. A decade of that incentive structure yields a workforce with excellent vertical depth and very few people who have operated meaningfully in two of these worlds — which is exactly the profile omnichannel needs. The incentive persists in most companies today, since promotion criteria and grading frameworks still describe advancement inside a discipline and quietly penalise the sideways year that would create the capability.
The regulatory layer narrows the pool further. A martech specialist from retail or financial services can learn a new platform quickly and still misjudge what a personalisation rule implies when the content is promotional material for a prescription medicine. Understanding where the boundaries fall, and how to route content through medical and legal review without stalling a programme, comes from having worked inside those cycles. That experience is sector-specific and slow to acquire, which is why cross-industry hiring into these roles succeeds more reliably when the regulatory competence already exists elsewhere in the team. The pairing works because the incoming specialist needs someone to check intent rather than syntax, and that check has to be available at the moment a configuration decision is made.
The people who do bridge these worlds are what Edward Galle calls brand-tech specialists, and their scarcity has a structural rather than cyclical character. Analysis in the World Economic Forum’s work on shifting core skills indicates that the technical requirements of roles are turning over faster than conventional career paths adapt, which suggests the intersection will keep moving. Employers planning around a stable target profile will keep missing it; employers planning around adaptable people will not. That reading points toward a different staffing strategy from the one most teams have been running.
Growing the capability from adjacent roles beats waiting for a finished profile to appear
Given a scarce intersection and a moving target, the practical answer for most commercial teams combines selective external hiring with deliberate internal development. The judgement required is about which of the five families genuinely has to be bought and which can be grown from people already inside the organisation who understand the products, the customers and the review culture. That judgement is worth making explicitly rather than by default, because the default in a hurry is always to post a requisition, and a requisition posted against a family that could have been developed spends scarce recruiting budget on the easiest part of the problem.
Orchestration and martech configuration are usually the two worth buying. Both require experience of having done the job before — an orchestrator learns sequencing judgement by watching programmes fatigue an audience, and a martech specialist learns platform constraints by having been responsible when a configuration failed. Content operations, analytics and field-digital capability grow more readily from existing staff, because the sector knowledge those roles depend on is the part that takes longest to acquire and the part your current team already holds. Where Swiss life sciences hiring shows sustained shortages in specialist commercial roles, this split also concentrates a limited recruiting budget where the market genuinely cannot be developed around.
For professionals, the same analysis reads as an unusually clear opportunity. Someone with a scientific or field background who adds martech and data fluency becomes a candidate for roles with very few qualified applicants, and the sector knowledge they already carry is the component employers cannot train quickly. The route works in the other direction too: a digital specialist who spends a year inside medical and legal review acquires the regulatory judgement that separates them from a large field of generalist marketing technologists. Both routes trade a year of apparent lateral movement for entry into a market with almost no competition, which is a favourable exchange in a discipline where vertical progression is crowded at every level.
Development needs structure to compound. Rotations into adjacent functions, ownership of a real programme rather than shadowing one, and explicit accountability for an outcome all convert exposure into capability. Formal learning accelerates the strategic judgement these roles reward, and Edward Galle candidates can use HBR-backed training journeys alongside that practical experience. Employers who publish this path internally also find it doubles as a retention argument for exactly the people competitors are trying to hire. Accountability is the element most often dropped, and it is the one that does the work, since a rotation without an owned outcome produces familiarity with a function rather than the judgement that comes from having carried its consequences.
The organisations that will hold an omnichannel advantage in five years are making these staffing decisions now, while the intersection is still scarce enough to be a genuine differentiator rather than a baseline expectation. The first move is small and available this quarter: name which of the five families your team currently staffs, decide which single missing one to develop and which to buy, and give one named person an outcome to own. Teams that take that step early tend to find the capability compounds while competitors are still writing the requisition.
Edward Galle sources omnichannel and brand-tech talent for regulated commercial teams across Switzerland, the EU and the US. Employers can discuss a role with our team or see how our search process works; professionals moving toward these roles can submit a CV for upcoming briefs.
References
- World Economic Forum. Future of Jobs Report. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/
- Panda International. Swiss Life Sciences Hiring Trends for 2026. https://www.panda-int.com/en-ch/insights/swiss-life-sciences-hiring-trends-for-2026/
