Interviewed by Max Golby
Keywords
Career CRAs, Employment, Freelance monitor, Personnel resourcing, Professional development, Reward package
Opening our short conversation earlier this summer, Stewart Hulse, Director of Recruitment Services for Novella Clinical, asks: “Where have all the career CRAs gone?”.
In fact, we wanted to conduct this short interview with Stewart to explore precisely this question. We wanted to find out what has happened to the once-great well of monitoring expertise, and what has led new CRAs to abandon the role as soon as possible, chasing the ladder of promotion as fast as employers will allow.
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Five to ten years ago, there were plenty of people with five years’ experience as a CRA and what’s more, they were very happy to be CRAs.” What seems to have changed, Stewart argues, is that where employers have continued to reward the position at historical levels, new graduates enter the role with ultimately unrealistic short-term expectations; this is, perhaps, understandable given the increasing financial burden of their higher education and levels of graduate debt. In addition, many simply see the role as a stepping stone to project management or similar positions. “
There’s an element of emulation here,” Stewart adds, “
with people thinking that they need to move through these positions so quickly, simply because they see everyone else doing it. On top of that, it’s also seen as a CV boosting exercise.” This is an area where Stewart sees the need for a strong message from the top, asserting that “
there is an element of employer responsibility here and it’s a wider problem with the industry. Companies simply aren’t rewarding a career CRA with eight years’ experience in the same way they reward a project manager with 4-5 years’ industry experience.” He adds that if we really want to see a continuation of career CRAs in the future, “
then we’re going to have to reward that career path and not put a glass ceiling on what they can hope to achieve in the long term.”
A further area of concern surrounds the increasingly rapid rate at which CRAs are looking to move into freelancing. “
Historically, a freelance CRA was a long-standing expert in their field. Someone with 10 or more years of industry experience behind them, having worked with numerous clients: a real clinical expert.” Stewart emphasises that there is still a real place for freelancers and clinical experts and continues to engage their services when required, yet today it seems that at least some relatively inexperienced CRAs see this as a quick and relatively painless way to short-term economic gain. Stewart comments that several of his own clients already refuse to even engage freelancers through third parties, such as recruitment agencies, adding that “
in the cold hard reality of it, jumping into freelancing too early just isn’t that lucrative. Where individuals are sometimes known to cut corners in order to make this early progression, they simply can’t because clients are looking for investment in continued professional development, support and training.”
Looking to the future, Stewart also touches on the ways in which employers have already begun to respond to this problem, contending that whilst not entirely visible yet, “
there is a growing shift towards rewarding a CRA on a level comparable to a project manager and that kind of renewed recognition for the role may come to have an impact in the years to come.” Stewart also indicates that certain companies are now beginning to put their foot down with regards to inexperienced freelancers; this could be seen as another indication of the industry’s attempt to adapt to the modern day climate: a new direction that will hopefully render Stewart’s original question inapplicable in the years to come.
Stewart Hulse is Director of Novella Clinical. Max Golby is a freelance journalist.
