A Statistician's Growth in Industry

by Les Pennelly

Being a statistician in industry can be quite rewarding if you follow opportunities for growth. I offer some observations from being in the research arm of the pharmaceutical industry for 34 years.

Assuming an individual gets a job in an industry that requires the use of good statistical practice; considerable growth will be accomplished throughout different stages of one’s career. This growth may be in terms of industry knowledge, application of one’s education to this knowledge, enhancement of the statistical knowledge to apply to difficult problems, improvement in personal relationship skills that make teams work, and development of the character and ethics to stand up for the principles that we were hired for.

In early years, growth in the company/industry is dominated by the change from an academic focused statistical environment to one where you learn how difficult it is to “apply a t-test” to a real problem. And why you will get tremendous satisfaction out of the solution even though it may take a month to do this simple analysis. Your reward may be in the application of an academic concept to a real solution; and perhaps a pat on the back from your manager.

As you learn more about you industry, you may get applied problems with more complicated analyses. The repeated measures analysis of a multi factor, crossover design with interactions/carry-over is not as easy as it is in the classroom.  Your reward may be is using some of the education, and associated common sense, that you never dreamed you would ever use.

As you gain more maturity, people come to you and ask hard questions about competing statistical issues such as missing/late data, multiple treatment groups, multiplicity of endpoints, interims data looks, control of alpha, and my favorite: outliers (the most interesting data are the outliers and “tell you more then any other data point”). At this time you solve problems that others cannot do because of the experience mix of statistical and industry knowledge and how they are intertwined at your company.  The reward is in knowing that you are doing industry-specific strategic statistical consulting that no one else maybe able to do. 

If you handle the advanced consulting with confidence while also exhibiting people skills, you may lead teams to larger successes then you could accomplish on your own. Imagine the sense of pride you get when you show your data management and technical review groups how to prevent study bias, especially when no one had a clue it could be an issue. How rewarding it is to make this impact and be recognized as the expert that everyone wants to work with!

Administrative and/or project management roles follow from the previous success. Sometimes these roles come earlier but early promotions are not good for your long term success. Make sure you are ready to defend your profession when an owner or senior director tells you that the failed study must look better and you have to do post hoc analyses to make the data look good. Ethics and character are all you have to fall back on and you do need to take an unpopular stand. But what a tremendous impact. Do it with conviction and with the senior employee characteristics touched on above and you gain respect.

What’s next?  Plenty, but if you can do all of the above your career journey will be rewarding for years  .