After completing a residency many jobs are open. Basically the residency gives you a "leg up" on the competition when competing for jobs (typically all jobs except those in retail; unless of course you did a community pharmacy residency). You should also look into board certification as well (
www.bpsweb.org) as that is necessary to validate you expertise in a given field.
Types of jobs and job market depend on the general availability within the area that you want to practice. As to whether the residency would limit your potential job oppurtunities I would think the opposite may be true (i.e. not doing a residency may limit your career options). You have to try to look at the "big picture". About 10-15 yrs ago the push for all PharmDs really began to become the "rule" w/i pharmacy schools. Up until that point the majority had RPh (clinical jobs were minimal) as most PharmD took the clinical positions at the major academic medical centers so it was hard to conceive how the PharmD would grow even though it had been around for decades. Now everybody has the PharmD so the question then becomes how do you separate yourself if you want to be more clinically oriented than the average pharmacist. Answer...do residency training. Right now since the transition is still in a process the reality is that residency training doesn't guarantee anything, but increases likelihood for you to get a clinical position. Much like nursing their is more of a market for entry level staffing jobs in retail or in hospitals (simply b/c that is where the supply is outweighed by demand). Often the clinical positions are newly created as the need for an expansion of pharmacy services is realized for various reasons (improved pt care, decrease side effects, pharmacist managed therapeutic drug monitoring and/or anticoag, pharmacist ran clinics (in VA setting), etc.). So the jobs are out there, it just depends whether you have the credentials for the job to present itself. I've mentioned in previous posts that it is hard to gauge demand of clinical pharmacist due to lack of ability to bill for services.
So basically you could do a yr of pharmacy practice and roll the dice to see what is out there. The specialties that typically pay the most and are the most available in all geographic areas are critical care and oncology. In the ambulatory settings pharmacists ran anticoagulation clinics are becoming much more popular in private sector. W/o residency training you have to realize that your options may be more limited in the future depending on what you want to do. You can get around this as well if you want to be more clinical by just educating yourself and keeping active with what is in the literature, but the transition is just easier w/ residency training. Your autonomy as a clinician will vary largely w/ what type of training and how many years you decide to complete. The VA setting by far provides the most autonomy giving prescribing privileges and focus on chronic care and ambulatory setting.
ACCP (
www.accp.com) typically provides the best search engines for clinical jobs acroos the nation. APhA (
www.aphanet.org) and Careerbuilder.com also typically provides a little bit of everything. Federal jobs can be searched via
www.usajobs.gov and/or
www.vacareers.va.gov. I hope this helps. For a more comprehensive review about clinical pharmacy and various career options a lot of people always point out the Pfizer Career Guide (
http://www.pfizercareerguides.com/)