The challenges faced by the biopharmaceutical industry in its key role to overcome the bottlenecks in innovative medicines development are related to addressing the technical knowledge gaps, the limitations to clinical trial testing, and the lack of clarity in the global pathways and processes to efficient outcomes. It is postulated that the lack of an adequately sized and appropriately trained multi-professional workforce, both in the industry and in the clinical research field, to enable fulfillment of the demanding aims for medicines development is a significant part of the problem. The current global status of pharmaceutical medicine’s efforts to conduct education and training is seen as patchy, inadequate, and without recognition, direction or leadership. It is therefore proposed that the movement towards competency-based education (CBE) should be harnessed, and core competency job and role profiles and competency curricula should be developed. CBE presents a means of addressing the educational and training needs within medicines development, harmonizing the workforce and the requirement for increased inter-professional teamwork. An educational environment in which aspiring and established biomedical professionals could readily learn about the competencies they need to pursue a particular career path is envisioned. Utilizing competencies provides the building blocks to align and harmonize the desired learning outcomes for effective performance amongst a multi-professional workforce. The effective implementation of training programs as described here has the potential to transform drug development procedures into an efficient and integrated process; medical product life-cycle management would result in the availability of better and safer medicines more rapidly, for the benefit of patients and society. © 2015, Springer International Publishing Switzerland.
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