My first year at Iperion

A personal story of Jeanneke Spruit about her first year as junior consultant at Iperion Life Sciences Consultancy

Only one year ago, I started working at Iperion. Fresh out of university, I was nervous to start my ‘adult working life’. I started with a job in the data entry Services department, but was soon convinced by my boss to switch to the consultancy side of Iperion. I was sceptic about consultancy at first: I believed that consultants were people that worked 80 hours per week, only to deliver powerpoints that were not really helping anyone.

However, during my first month of working at Iperion, I had to adjust my opinion: these consultants were normal people, working a healthy amount of hours, in an effort to actually make the difference for their clients and for the industry as a whole. I was inspired by the Iperion mission to enable the life sciences industry to be more innovative and efficient, in order to improve the delivery of medicine to the patient. A digital world as the one we are living in offers a lot of opportunities for more transparency and efficiency, and Iperion is pushing both industry and regulators to get to that point.

First projects

Now that I was convinced that Iperion consultants were actually useful, I was eager to become part of the team. I continued to spend a large amount of my time on data entry in the regulatory information management system (RIMS) of one of our clients as part of my training program, but I was also included in some smaller projects to learn more about consultancy work. For my first project, I compared the clinical particulars information (i.e. data about the approved indications of a medicinal product) from two internal systems. Together with my senior colleague, I found many differences and we tried to find out where these differences originated, and what indication would reach the patient. It was very interesting, as I learned about both the opportunities of data (quickly find different medications for the same indication), but also its drawbacks (when translating information like an indication to a standardised datapoint, different interpretations lead to different data).

I was inspired by the Iperion mission to enable the life sciences industry to be more innovative and efficient.

After this first project, I have been working on different subjects. My biggest project started in May, to support a company in their transition to a new RIM system and the daily operations about xEVMPD. Due to the covid-19 measures throughout 2020, I have not been able to visit my client in person. This was (and is) challenging for me, as I find it harder to connect with people when I’m not around. Nonetheless, I very much enjoyed this first year. The different initiatives at Iperion to stay connected and informed helped me to become part of the team, and guided me in my client communications. Even though working from home is not ideal, I feel like I can still grow and learn, and of course deliver my first projects.
 

I was inspired by the Iperion mission to enable the life sciences industry to be more innovative and efficient.

Personal development

Altogether, doing consultancy work has helped me find my strengths (I never knew before that I was a creative person, to name one), and motivated me to learn new knowledge and skills (I never knew what happened after the clinical trails, and I never knew that a slide deck could be more informative than a 20-page paper, but here I am today…). This year has made me confident that I can master new skills whenever it is needed, and I appreciate the freedom to work on different projects around different subjects. I think the best thing about being an Iperion consultant is the versatility of the job, combined with the energetic #TeamIperion that motivates and inspires. In 2019, I never thought that I would be a consultant, but at the closing of 2020 I find myself happily working as one. I’m excited to see what my next year at Iperion will bring!

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