Employers

Clinical data managers work for health care organizations and for research centers that may be private, public, or part of academic institutions. They are often employed in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries and in clinical research organizations. The job closest to that of clinical data managers that the U.S. Department of Labors Occupational Outlook Handbook provides information on is data scientists. Approximately 168,900 data scientists are employed in the United States. About 12 percent of data scientists work for management, scientific, and technical consulting services firms and scientific research and development services firms.

Starting Out

An internship is one way that clinical data managers get started in this career. Contact your schools career services office for help with locating internship opportunities at health care or research organizations. Internships and employment opportunities can also be found through professional associations. Search the following Web sites for internship openings and job listings:

• American Mathematical Society: http://www.ams.org/opportunities
• American Statistical Association: https://www.amstat.org/education/statistics-students/internships-and-fellowships
• Association for Computing Machinery: http://jobs.acm.org
• IEEE Computer Society: https://www.ieeeusa.org/careers

Other ways to search for jobs and internships include contacting companies directly, working with employment agencies, and attending career fairs and networking events. LinkedIn also offers opportunities to join professional groups and keep up with industry news and trends. Create a profile page on LinkedIn and conduct a search for clinical data manager groups that are open to participation.

Clinical data managers with five or more years of experience can advance to become senior managers. They assume more responsibilities, including managing more staff members and overseeing more complex projects. In major corporations they may become department heads. Those with many years of experience in the field may start their own consulting companies. Others share their knowledge by teaching workshops and speaking at professional association events, or by becoming college professors.

Visit the following Web sites for job listings:

• https://careers.computer.org
• https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/clinical-data-manager-jobs
• http://jobs.acm.org

Read publications about clinical data management to keep up with industry practices and news. A good place to start is with resources from the Society for Clinical Data Management (SCDM), including Good Clinical Data Management Practice (a reference and benchmark for data managers worldwide), the Journal of the Society for Clinical Data Management, and the SCDM Podcast. Visit https://scdm.org/knowledge to access these resources.

Attend conferences to meet others working in data management and participate in continuing education opportunities. There are just a few examples:

• AWS re:Invent: https://reinvent.awsevents.com
• IEEE International Big Data Congress: https://bigdataieee.org
• Society for Clinical Data Management Annual Conference: https://scdm.org

The Association for Computing Machinery and its Special Interest Group on Management of Data offers student memberships, for access to publications, a mentorship program, and continuing education opportunities: https://sigmod.org/membership/for-students.