Every scientist reading this knows what a bad CAPA looks like.
You identify a symptom. You implement a fix. The problem comes back three months later because you never actually found the root cause. You wasted time, resources, and goodwill on a solution that was never going to work.
Your career problems work exactly the same way.
The most common career mistake I see among high-achieving women in pharma and biotech is not a lack of skill, effort, or ambition. It is treating the symptom instead of the root cause. And the consequences are the same as a bad CAPA: the problem keeps coming back, you keep spinning, and nothing actually changes.
Two examples that play out constantly
The first: you are unhappy in your job but you only know what you don’t want, not what you actually do want. So you change companies, or you do nothing.
Either way, six months later you are in the same situation with a different backdrop. The root cause, not being clear on what you want and what would genuinely fulfill you, never got addressed.
The second: you have a difficult colleague or a manager whose behavior is affecting your work. You try to avoid them. You feel frustrated and stuck. Maybe you attempted a conversation and it went nowhere, so now you just manage around them indefinitely. You are treating the symptom.
The root cause is a gap in communication, influencing, and self-advocacy skills that would allow you to address the situation directly and resolve it for good.
Every pain point, every frustration, every feeling of being stuck or overlooked in your career is simply a problem waiting to be solved. There is nothing you have to permanently settle for. There is nothing you are required to just live with.
The real reason smart women stay stuck
Here is where it gets interesting, and I say this with full understanding because I have been here myself and have coached many women through the same thing.
The reason most high achievers do not solve their career problems is because they do not believe a different outcome is possible for them.
If you genuinely believed that the promotion was achievable, you would pursue it. If you believed the skill was learnable and that learning it would change things, you would put in the work. If you believed you could get clear on what you want and build a real plan to get it, you would start today.
We choose to stay stuck when we believe we cannot control the outcome.
When we tell ourselves we are not ready, not strategic enough, not visible in the right way. When the discomfort of staying exactly where we are feels less threatening than the vulnerability of betting on ourselves and potentially being disappointed.
That logic is understandable. It is also keeping you from your potential.
Here is the thing about those thoughts: they are not facts. They feel true because somewhere along the way your brain built a very convincing case for why the risk is not worth it. But feelings are not evidence.
And the belief that things cannot change is often the only thing standing between where you are and where you want to be.
Troubleshooting is a learnable skill
Just like you learned the CAPA process, you can learn to identify the root cause of any career problem and solve for it correctly.
The gap preventing you from advancing, from feeling as satisfied as you could in your work, from making the impact you are capable of, is almost always one of three things: a skill you have not yet built, a blind spot you cannot see because you are inside it, or a strategy you are missing because no one with actual industry experience ever showed it to you.
Find the gap. Solve for the root cause. That is how the problem stops coming back.
If you want help identifying exactly where your gap is, I work with women in pharma and biotech to do exactly this.
Want to go deeper? My book Your Worthy Career: A Science-Backed Method to Build a Meaningful Career in Pharma and Biotech walks you through the exact framework I use with clients to identify your right next move, build your visibility, and take ownership of your career trajectory in this industry. Get the book here.
You can also tune into the Your Worthy Career podcast for strategy, insights, and real talk about what it actually takes to advance in pharma and biotech.
And if you are ready to work together, send me a message on LinkedIn. I work exclusively with women in pharma and biotech who are high performers but feel stuck, overlooked, or unsure of their next right move.
