How Does a Biostatistician Keep Up With Changes to Their Role?

7 Strategies to Turn Challenges Into Opportunities

As a biostatistician, you can be sure that changes in processes, procedures, and regulations will affect your work. You’ll need to be adaptable as the responsibilities and duties within your role evolve.

While change can be invigorating, it can also be demoralizing. Especially if it forces you to take your work in a different direction and means you need to recode work you have already painstakingly completed.

Here are our tips to keep up with changes to your role as a biostatistician.

1.    Stay Positive

Change may disrupt your day or your week. It may get you down. It may even cause more work. Whatever negative feelings that change causes, it is important to stay positive. It may not be a perfect situation, but you have the skills and experience to cope. Here’s another reason to remain positive: you’re more likely to get the help you need if you are a positive colleague.

2.    Stay Connected with Your Colleagues

Don’t be afraid to reach out and connect with your colleagues. In close teams, colleagues are there to help each other. If you are having difficulty understanding the impact of a regulation change, for example, discuss this with others. You may find that the impact is less than you had feared.

Asking questions will help to equip you for new responsibilities and duties.

3.    Relax!

Nothing is rarely as impactful as it seems, and stress will cloud your judgement. Relax into the change, analyze it, and consider what it really means for the project and tasks you are working on. Consider the skills needed to overcome any hurdles that are in your way, discuss your concerns with your manager, and set expectations for deliverables.

4.    Be a Continuous Learner

A rule of good time management is that if you allow for an emergency, one will never throw you off course. Similar can be said of change. If you are prepared for changes to your role, then you will be better equipped to deal with changes when they happen.

A crucial element in preparedness is to continuously develop your skills. What skills do you anticipate will become essential skills in the future? If you work remotely, be ready to overcome the challenges of remote work. Talk to your manager to get a better idea of what changes are likely to impact your role and what skills will be needed.

5.    Focus on What You Can Control

Often, anxiety about change is caused by becoming overly concerned by what you cannot control. Instead, focus on what you can control – your reaction to any change. Analyze the situation, consider the actual impact to your tasks, and then consider how to adapt what you are doing or how you are doing what you need to do. Taking this measured approach allows you to get perspective on the change, and then to take a measured approach that yields the most positive results.

6.    Make Your Job Easier

When faced with change, think of what work you have done before and if you could incorporate it into what must now be done. For example, you may have coded solutions in previous work that can be easily adapted to current work requirements.

Change Is Not a Challenge – It Is an Opportunity

In this uncertain world, change is becoming more constant. Employing these seven tips will help you to overcome the challenges that change delivers and instead use them as opportunities to develop new skills, increase your experience, broaden your network, and improve career and earning opportunity in the future.

To find your future as a biostatistician today, submit your resume to SimulStat. We don’t create challenges, we deliver opportunities.