Pros
Optimal is great. I've been with optimal for a wee while but left in early 2023. Your experience at Optimal Clinical Trials will be exactly what you make of it. It is a fairly small and young company and it comes with its challenges. They are greatly outweighed by the benefits. - High levels of trust in employees. Employees are given a lot of responsibility and trust. You will be left to learn and discover new things for yourself. But be reassured if you try your best and get stuck, there will be people to help you out and provide guidance. - A lot of learning and progression opportunities. Being a young company, chances are you will always be doing something no-one has done before - setting up a difficult trial, negotiating with a new sponsor, finding out new vendors for procedures, setting up whole new departments etc. No other place will give you this much scope. - Positive environment. Because of the 2 points above, you are bound to make mistakes sometimes. In a way, you are encouraged to try new things. If you never try, you'll never fail, right? Optimal has a healthy culture around making mistakes. You learn a lesson, share it and move on. It can be very confronting having to stand up and say "I have made this mistake, and here is what I learnt" at first, but Optimal is a place where you can do so safely. I have made countless errors and learnt and shared many lessons from there. - Fun environment. Can have a good yarn with anyone. - Good compensation. Perhaps not initially, but progression here is (was?) FAST. Your initial rate will be low but will rise very fast as you progress. - Excellent team. The team is amazing. Helpful, energetic, kind and smart. Pleasure to work with. - Overall I loved my time at optimal and will always have a positive opinion of it. Can't wait to take part in a trial with Optimal some time :)
Cons
- Very easy to ignore work-life balance. I spend so many extra hours at work. No regrets, but I wish I wasn't on salary for that time! - High rate of change. Hard to decide whether it is a Pro or a Con. There are a lot of new developments happening at Optimal all the time and it's hard to keep up with all the conflicting instructions which come out weekly. "We must cross-train!" to "We need to specilise and stick to the JDs", "we're hip and flexible" to "No work flexibility at all or everyone will want it" etc. I understand it is the nature of business and it evolves as it grows but can be frustrating at times. - If you do something for the company once, everyone will assume it's your responsibility from that point on. You'll end up doing everything from quality to IT to HR to training doctors to laying cables. Great way to get many skills at once but can be distracting to actual work. - Some roles can be done remotely and should be. - Loss of the close knit team culture as the company grows. This is an artefact of growing fast, so quite expected.
