Have you ever been stuck in moving something forward?
Do you wonder why others seem to be able to cut through the bureaucracy more easily?
Are you frustrated by the politics around you?

Olaf has a really interesting character. He is an IT guy and he went up through the ranks of different companies, had a great career and learned quite a lot about leadership. He was applying a lot of these learnings and now he's training others in that regard as he has his very own leadership program. I'm a participant and have benefited a lot.

One day, we agreed to discuss the 4 pillars of boosting your career. He helped me sharpen my thoughts and here's the result!

What is Statistical Engineering (SE)?

How did the idea of Statistical Engineering come about?

Is SE an idea and a practice, or is it a profession, or both? 

How does SE compare to the role/profession of “statistician” and/or “data scientist”?

Today, I have an interview with Margaret Gamalo, about how to combine a controlled arm with real world evidence data, a really hot topic.

Also, Margaret has been sharing her knowledge for a long time and has gained lots of opportunities this way. Helping others will help you in the long-run. We discuss this aspect in the episode as well.

Are you overwhelmed by work?
Do you feel like being constantly under time pressure?

As I’m talking with colleagues in nearly all organizations, there seems to be an overall increase in workload, shorter timelines, a reduced number of people to help, and also an increase in complexity of the projects. 

This leads to the breakdown of the system.

There’s some interesting research by a German mathematician, who wanted to understand why the German railway system sometimes completely breaks down and delays accumulate quickly over the day.

Do you want to help someone improve their visualization skills?
Or do you want to train others on any other statistics skills?

Training is a very important topic for us statisticians. We train people all the time it can be about statistics or non-statistics.

Is it possible to align business focus and self development at the same time?
How can we create clear department or company goals or relate these to our goals?

In this episode, Benjamin talk about how to make business focus and self development work together. We also provide you numerous tips on how to make it work.

While we go through our career, we have lots of days that are more or less similar: meetings, discussions, and emails. But sometimes there are spotlight moments. You can be in a meeting with various senior people or work with new clients that is really critical. You have a meeting that will make it or break it. Very often these kind of meetings come with some kind of warning. You e.g. know you need to defend your case in front of a committee and it will be a tough discussion.

One of the toughest discussion you can be in as a statistician is a GBA hearing in Germany. During this meeting you can make or break the launch of a new product or indication in Germany with consequences for Europe and beyond. As a statistician you're here in a high stake discussion.

What is a statistical unicorn?
What should we be doing to become one?

Gary Sullivan introduced me to Ena and she's a really interesting statistician. She was actually quite ahead of her time when she founded her CRO.