Life in the cloud: how technology is improving life science development
By: Krista Henry
The global pandemic has been a catalyst for change in many industries. None more so than in life science, where organizations have been moving at light speed to battle COVID-19 and improve human health.
In the spotlight to assist life science development is cloud computing. With advance systems of remote servers hosted on the internet, cloud computing is helping to unlock key data and make global collaboration easier. According to Linkedin, cloud computing skills were among the top three most in-demand skills for employers in the past three years. In the last several months that has only been amplified as businesses moved online in new ways.
Leading the charge in cloud software for Life Science in Canada is Veeva Systems. The company provides data, software and services to support research and development. “We produce software for the life sciences industry,” says Andrew Smith, senior engineering manager at Veeva. “We unify the suite of applications that a life science company would need, for example, to develop a new drug or vaccine.”
The company also supplies services for consumer packaging, chemical manufacturing, cosmetics and more. They provide software applications that help research and development (R&D) as well as quality and regulatory teams eliminate inefficiencies.
“We develop suite of applications that are next generation which increases effectiveness and efficiency of the life science industry in particular,” says Smith. “For example, you have a specific application related to running clinical trials and electronic data capture from one vendor that does that very well. But you have another vendor for a next application, we're unifying those applications to improve the effectiveness.”
Early talent is key to industry success
The global pandemic increased the need for digital acceleration in the life science industry. This includes acceleration in pharmaceuticals, biotech, digital health and healthcare services such as hospital management and training. Veeva plays a role in assisting clients to adopt software that allows people to work from anywhere.
Helping them to achieve digital success are math and engineering co-op students. Co-op students can easily address labour shortages when talent is scarce.
“The University of Waterloo has been a tremendous source of talent for us,” says Smith. “There are countless new grads who started as co-ops that have progressed through the company. It’s so hard to find good talent these days, so the relationship with Waterloo is pivotal for us.”
Co-op students bring new “hunger” to Smith’s team and are noted to be tremendous performers. “Students bring very strong computer science, engineering related programming skills and diverse experiences. They learn quickly, work well in teams and really have those computer science fundamentals,” adds Smith.
According to Smith this is the type of talent the industry will need in the future. “There’s definitely a trend towards moving deployed software to the cloud. There’s a lot of machine learning and a bit of a shift towards procedural programming, languages like Go, Javascript based and more,” he says.
Veeva hires co-op students in roles as intern data product manager, network data analyst, software engineer, intern technical writer, data scientist and product designer.
Why hire students for cloud-based tech?
Getting early talent is necessary for the success of any organization. Andrew Smith gives his top reasons to consider students for talent development strategies:
1. Mutually beneficial relationship
"You get great talent injected into your company. And, there’s the possibility for them to come back when they graduate. There’s a lot of benefit for the company and you're also benefiting the University in a sort of reciprocal relationship.”
2. Energy and team spirit
“They bring energy to everything they do. Co-ops do what it takes to help their team.”
3. Balance of experience
“You can’t have a team with all 10 plus years of experience. You need a balance of different perspectives, backgrounds and levels of experience. I couldn’t imagine building a team without those co-ops and new grads.”
4. Rewarding experience
“It's so rewarding to harness their passion and potential. The experience of developing someone is really some of the greatest of my career as a manager. I've seen such raw potential with co-ops where you give them the encouragement and opportunity to progress, and they advance moving from smaller tasks to bigger and better.”