0:00:12 - David Williams
Hiring skilled staff is tough in any industry, and hiring research staff for clinical trials is especially daunting. The field is growing quickly but historically there's been no organized entry-level pipeline, so new college graduates have essentially zero awareness about this field and the career path. Hr and talent development veteran Garrett Walker is tackling the opportunity head-on. After the distinguished career-running talent management for places like Verizon, ibm and Quintiles, he founded Virb, a people-centric clinical trial ecosystem to provide talent for pharma companies and clinical research organizations and training, mentorship, community and guaranteed jobs for graduates. Hi everyone, i'm David Williams, president of Strategy Consulting Firm Health Business Group and host of the Health Biz podcast, a weekly show where I interview top healthcare leaders about their lives and careers. If you liked this episode, please press that like button and subscribe. 

0:01:08 - Garrett Walker
Garrett, welcome to the Health Biz podcast Hi, david, thanks for making the time to talk. 

0:01:15 - David Williams
Absolutely So. We're going to talk a lot about clinical trial staffing and the challenges of that, but let's start with you and, in particular, your background, your upbringing. Do you have any childhood influences that have stuck with you, for example? 

0:01:30 - Garrett Walker
Oh, great, great question. You know I would say David. You know, probably the most powerful childhood influence that I had is my family and my father, who was a research scientist in cancer research. So I grew up, you know, having conversations at a very early age, really just listening to what he was working on. He was truly immersed in his science and so that's how I grew up, you know, being immersed in what he was working on, and throughout my early childhood and preteen and teen years would spend weekends with him at his lab. You know he would be doing the daddy daycare and he'd stick me in his lab to watch him do what he was doing or keep me busy. And that led to, you know, first couple of jobs that I had where you know he would place me in various, you know, support roles in the labs that he was running. 

0:02:39 - David Williams
Cool. So what did you do for education? What did you study in college? 

0:02:45 - Garrett Walker
Yeah, great question. So I started my undergraduate as a chemistry major and was a chemistry major for right through my sophomore year And at that point in time I actually switched. I switched majors and focused on business. So I minored in chemistry and and and majored in business. So I graduated with a business degree with a very heavy science load. 

0:03:15 - David Williams
Great. And so what did you do after school? I know eventually you got onto some of these behemoths like Verizon and IBM, but where did you? where'd you start off? where you're always working with the big companies? 

0:03:26 - Garrett Walker
No, actually, when I, when I first graduated from from school, i actually did, i did a year working in my dad's lab, in my father's laboratory, actually doing doing some work that he was focused on on gastric cancer. So I, i was I was, at that point in time, past the preteen helper stage and actually a fully paid research assistant working alongside you know very, very strong technicians and also a number of people who were there, you know, doing a year before they went to medical school, and from there I made a determination that my interests really focused more on the business side than pure science side, and so, from from that role, i joined actually what was the precursor of from Verizon GTE, and joined their internal audit group with the purpose of learning the business and starting from the ground up. 

0:04:28 - David Williams
I remember back in the day, garrett, they said they say gee, they say no GTE. So it's like I guess it was one of the. You know, i don't know if that's one of the better slogans or not, but at least I remember it from 1970s, something, i think. Yeah. 

0:04:43 - Garrett Walker
Yeah, That was it And that that that was actually a great entry point. I mean, you don't know, when you're just coming out of college and starting your first job, that you've made the right decision. You just know that you've got a, you know, a good job and a good learning opportunity. Yeah, And that was that was what I found when I joined GTE, which you know ultimately became Verizon through a combination of acquisitions. 

0:05:08 - David Williams
Yeah, So you know, when I normally am interviewing people on the show, people that have started companies, ceos most commonly they've come up through either sales, marketing, finance, r&d, and it's less common to have people come up through sort of the talent management space. You know, sometimes I think about in larger organizations or anywhere. Sometimes HR is sort of like off to the side. You know it's not so powerful And yet it's fairly fundamental, i think, as people are realizing now. And it sounds like you didn't necessarily start out there, but after learning the business you sort of got into that space. Well, you know, what was, what was that all about? 

0:05:44 - Garrett Walker
Yeah, that's. That's a great question. You know, my my career has has actually spanned a number of business areas. You know, as I say, i started in the internal audit area And as I grew in the internal audit, i then moved into the technology role with, at that point, verizon, who was implementing a brand new product at the time. So I've aged myself called SAP And I took the lead of the HR payroll implementation, which was my introduction to human resources very much in a systems application and process approach. 

And from there, you know, put that in place and found myself really very focused on the talent side of the business and how the critical part of running a business is always driven by talent And by putting the right systems in place and the processes in place. Managing that talent effectively can drive tremendous value within the organization. And, coming from the business side, i also recognize that the one of the largest costs of any business is your payroll And having implemented the SAP payroll, i knew exactly how much was being spent at Verizon and recognize that the ROI on that was critically important to the business. So getting it right, very important And managing that talent effectively was an imperative that I felt could be managed really really well with with a business eye and a real sense for the value of people. 

0:07:23 - David Williams
And what was the contrast, would you say, between IBM and Verizon? 

0:07:30 - Garrett Walker
Great question, i would say. from Verizon to IBM, the complexity was significantly larger. You went from a telecom giant to a business IT services global business that was growing rapidly on the software space and constantly innovating and looking for opportunities to really create value and differences in the business world through innovation. That was very exciting. When I moved to IBM, it was a tremendous opportunity for me to bring the business side and the talent side together. My first job at IBM was hired in to be the chief operating officer for their learning services division, which was very much a business and a people business for IBM, both internally and for external clients. 

0:08:33 - David Williams
Got it. Then quintiles now obviously we're getting closer to clinical trials staffing here. As far as I know, Verizon isn't involved in that, but who knows, IBM probably is, and they're involved in a lot of things. What was quintiles like and what did you discover? 

0:08:49 - Garrett Walker
there It's a great segue to my time at IBM was 12 years. I had the opportunity to work both within HR but also within business development and in the development of the business process outsourcing for IBM, which is where I spent a good five years of my career around the world. As you know and as most people know, ibm is very process driven and is very supply train driven. When you think about supply chain, that's always in the back of my mind is how do you optimize the supply chain? When I joined quintiles quintiles, it was exciting because I was moving from a business that had been innovating and driving business solutions from an IT perspective but also building out talent around the world to support outsourcing. 

Quintiles was a very large client of IBM. It was a natural move but actually learning the business and learning the healthcare business and the CRO business from the inside. The change really was the excitement of joining a large, growing company whose mission was to enhance and extend human life. That was a tremendous driver for me to make the move, as well as what I believed I could bring to the table, which was a lot of discipline around how we could manage and optimize the talent to support the trials. 

0:10:20 - David Williams
Great. Now, obviously, that brings us to what you're doing now with Verb. If you could maybe just describe I guess Verb is a noun, is that right? Just describe what was the unmet need that you'd seen, perhaps at quintiles or elsewhere. That said, hey, this is a space I got to get into and really put a stake in the ground. 

0:10:43 - Garrett Walker
When I joined Quintiles, i had my first 100-day plan. Joining as the chief human resource officer. You always start with the basics, which is you need to understand the business. You need to learn the business first. What I learned very quickly at Quintiles was this is a very simple business compared to the complexities that I was dealing with at IBM, but simple in terms of supply chain, not simple in terms of the complexities of the compounds in the drugs that were being developed to save lives. 

My focus was on where is the value created? What do the people need to be able to do optimally to deliver those trials? What I discovered is, within the 15,000 people employed at Quintiles, the relative contribution which is something that I always look at came down to seven key roles which were absolutely essential to run an effective trial on time for a pharmaceutical sponsor. That's really where I started to dig in. That was my focus is what are those people doing and how effective are they, and how can we make them better at what they're doing and how can we ensure that we have enough of them? 

0:12:08 - David Williams
In the introduction I talked about a career path and knowing what's what. If somebody graduates in chemistry or electrical engineering or computer science, they may have a decent idea that IBM hires those people. Part of the reason is that it's just obvious. But also IBM goes around to career fairs and what's what. The clinical trial business is a pretty big business but I would venture to say well, most people don't really know about it. It's not something you think hey, i majored in X and they don't necessarily major in clinical trials. Or even if you do biostatistics or something, it's not even obvious that there's this industry out there. Is that the case or is that just me projecting? 

0:12:50 - Garrett Walker
No, you're very much on target. The clinical research organizational industry grew up in the past 40 years outsourcing clinical trials from pharmaceutical companies. The way that business worked and the way it was set up was as those trials were outsourced. many of the existing experienced professionals were really transferred if you will, re-badged from pharma into the CROs to continue the work they were doing, which worked tremendously well. The absent component of that, which I identified pretty quickly when I was at Quintiles, was the insertion, if you will, or the recruiting and the building of early career professionals coming out of universities or people who are changing careers to find on-ramps into those roles. 

Clinical research associates is a critical role on the clinical trial side Stat programmers, biostatisticians, data managers and those were the roles that were driving the trials. They're critically important for patients' safety. They're very, very important for quality and also for an effective trial being run for the sponsors. That's really where I started to put my focus is where are those people coming from and how can we optimize that talent? Also very, very concerned, i'm very much a numbers guy. When I came into Quintiles, what I saw was a recruiting engine that was running super high, running at 100% in terms of acquiring talent, experienced professionals. but we're also losing 20% a year in attrition in those roles. That was a big red flag for me. 

0:14:45 - David Williams
Yeah, i guess if you're growing at 10 or 20% and you're losing 20%, then that's a heck of a lot of hiring that you need to do, especially if you're just sort of churning through people that are already in the industry. Did they have, or did the other CROs have, kind of development program for those who haven't entered the industry yet, either career changers or those coming out of university? 

0:15:06 - Garrett Walker
Certainly, when I joined Quintiles there were definitely programs And with the competition that continued to emerge within the industry, they had early career development. 

There's no question, Every large CRO had early career development and recruiting practices on campus. 

But the major focus has been on, and continues to be, experienced professionals. Because they are easy to drop in, They're immediately billable And because of the way the business is structured, the investment although it's very heavy in terms of dollars to acquire experienced professionals, makes the most sense. And so building a large pipeline of early career professionals to fill that pipeline of new talent and grow that talent for those seven billable roles was far lower than what I could see was needed at the time I joined. But when I look to the future and that's really where the story of Verve happens, if you look out five years, if you play the story of OK, we have a growing gap of talent right And it's harder and harder to find experienced professionals. It's critically important to invest in that early pipeline so that you can grow people into your organization, not only to fill capacity, but it builds culture and retention And it allows you to really create stickiness with your employees and reduce that attrition and also ensure that your brand is well recognized. 

0:16:50 - David Williams
With the next generation, So let's talk about we've been talking about it from the perspective mostly of the CRO and maybe the pharma company. Let's talk about it from the perspective of some of these early career folks. So somebody say, just coming out of university, and it's a different generation than you know, the newer I and hear different things. I also hear not to stereotype by generation, but I read the term the other day. You know, fun employment, meaning like unemployment and it's fun somehow. Different career changes You've got more remote work, we've got AI coming and so on. How does somebody coming out of school, you know, think about their career? What does it mean to, you know, begin a career in the clinical trials space? What are some of the things that someone should be thinking about once they even have an awareness, if that's a possibility. 

0:17:36 - Garrett Walker
When you talk about the university students, you talk about people who are looking for career changes, who are also a very large population. 

The opportunities to your point within clinical research tend to be invisible to most people And even the stories you'll hear from and I certainly heard them and continue to hear them is you know, i really don't know how to get into clinical research and to get an opportunity to become a clinical research associate if I don't already have experience And I run into this in interviewing. 

What career changers students should be looking for are what are those on ramps to get the training and certification that you need to have the ability to go in and really nail an interview and have the qualifications to do that work at an entry level position And that's what verb is all about is to create a supply and capacity of highly talented, engaged and motivated individuals and people to get those opportunities, and that's why I wanted to build verb is as much as I want to grow the supply and the capacity. 

I also feel it's critically important that that capacity come from the next generation, that it be early career professionals who will have a tremendous career within clinical research, because we do have not only a finite pool of experienced professionals. But we have a demographic issue, which is that you're at the average age of a CRA is 48 years old And we do not have a lot of early career professionals entering into those roles. So over time, without addressing that at the business level, you're mortgaging your future on the workforce because you're just not going to have the population you need as trials continue to grow and expand at 10% a year. 

0:19:46 - David Williams
So is there a career path for an individual let's say, if it's an entry level, you know you get the training at the certification they get to get beyond this catch 22 of be happy to hire you if you had experience. Are they then on a plateau or is there an opportunity to grow, either within the CRA role or to shift to some other role over time? 

0:20:06 - Garrett Walker
There are many career paths into clinical research and when you talk about entry-level positions, you can really think about it as really two. I think of it as two broad categories. There's the data science area that you can go into as an early career professional, or the clinical operation side, And they're distinct with regard to roles. So the roles in the data science side would be data managers, statistical programmers and biosatisticians. And on the CLIN OPS side you would have clinical research coordinators who work directly at patient sites, clinical research associates who do the monitoring of the trials You can actually think of them as almost internal auditors for trials, but critically important for patient safety as well as the effective running of the trial project managers. And so the career path at entry level is entry level at the CRA level. On the clinical OPS side the CRCs, the clinical research coordinators There's a tremendous opportunity right now and many, many openings for those roles as well at the sites which we are supporting. 

Project managers is really a stepping stone career move. So you could think of it as you know, as if you're a CRA, a project manager role might be something that you're interested in. Your trajectory could go there. If you're a CRC, you might, over time wish to be a CRA, and that's a great career move. Stat programmers move within the data science side and sometimes they actually cross over into the CLIN OPS side. 

And what we do at Virb is we offer the opportunity not only to be fully trained and we train very differently, David we train people to do the job, as opposed to just pass a test and be certified, which is the vast majority of the training that's out there, whether it be internal within the organization itself, a business that's running trials or an external entity is to train to pass a test. And we actually train experientially using something called Spiral Learning and AI to customize the training for the student so that they can actually do the job when they finish or graduate the course and therefore be much more attractive to an employer, as well as have the confidence level for doing the role. And from the business side, from the client side, the CRO side or the pharma side, you're getting a resource that comes directly out of training that is billable within two months, as opposed to being billable in seven or eight months, which is the norm if you go through a certification trap class but have yet to learn how to do the job Makes sense. 

0:22:57 - David Williams
So you've already answered part of this question, but I want to ask you you have this insight about the lack of the kind of early stage career path that you could fill. How do you go from beyond that insight into making that really a viable business and sustainable business for Virb over the long term? 

0:23:15 - Garrett Walker
So when we created Virb, the vision for Virb was and is to number one, create opportunity for everyone who wants to find a career in clinical research and, clearly, the structure around that from a technology platform, so we can source and recruit and train globally entry level positions. But also we can upskill people who are currently employed in healthcare, particularly in the pharma or CRO space or biotech space, who are doing those roles but need a specific therapeutic area, so we can train that. And it's all based on that spiral learning. So it's very, very, if you will, current in terms of how you learn. It's not the way you and I learned. It's gamified, it's experiential and it's designed to consistently become more complex as you learn. And the AI is tracking you as an individual, so it's producing content specific to the areas that you're excelling in and where you need more work. 

I'm not sure that answered your question, but that's how we train people And the platform that we've developed, which is what we call our MVP. So it's our first platform. We have additional platform and products that are coming out in the second half of the year That allows people not only to train but to train together. We run classes that are global, but we may have a class of 20 in which five people are in India, six people are in the US and the rest are in Australia. But they're all taking the course remotely together and they do group work together. That's instructor-led, so our courses have instructors involved in components of the learning. 

0:25:10 - David Williams
Now it sounds like a great idea and I'm wondering whether you've gotten traction. Are you, is the industry seeing this being successful? It's a conservative kind of a field that don't change necessarily So quickly. what sort of proof points are you getting as you build the business? 

0:25:27 - Garrett Walker
Yes. So we introduced what we call a soft launch in the beginning of 2022. And we focused specifically in the data science area, where there was a very high need and a very high demand for new talent based on attrition as well as the growth that was existing just as COVID was ending, and what we're able to do is actually land several large contracts with large CROs and biotechs who would contract with us to support the development of those data science roles. And so we got immediate traction and significant orders to source for global talent. So talent based in Asia and talent based in the United States. So that was the first proof point was to get the contract signed. The second proof point is we identified very quickly a very high percentage of unmet and almost invisible demand from prospective students And when I say students, they could be people graduating from university or people who are working in a healthcare space who haven't seen an opportunity to get into clinical research, applying for these opportunities to get into the program. And when we turned that, if you will, engine on for sourcing, we very quickly saw a very large population of qualified people coming in to compete to get into those programs. We have a 98% completion rate. So when people get in, 98% of them are completing the course and are being placed. So they're going directly into well paying jobs around the globe, both in the CRA space as well as in the data science space, and that's exciting for us because that's really our mission. 

Our mission is we want to supply chain that allows us to help people who want roles and jobs in the clinical research space to get them and to be very, very well trained and confident and also fill that capacity gap that's out there. So we've gotten good traction. We're excited about what we're doing. We have basically smaller mid-market companies now coming to us and looking for solutions that include not just starting career professionals entry level, but upscaling programs. 

So people who currently work in the workforce for a CRO or a biotech there are opportunities for us to train in therapeutic areas. So oftentimes a clinical trial will come to a CRO or to a biotech from a pharma and they will need 40 of their staff who are going to work on the trials to be trained on oncology And then from oncology, maybe in small cell lung cancer, and they need that training certification delivered, and we now have the opportunity to build that and actually deliver it internally for that existing workforce, which continues to just be. I just get very excited about this because we're meeting a need that has been unmet and we're also helping to build and future-proof the clinical trial workforce for the whole industry, which is what we're about, right, it's not serving a single company, but really helping the entire industry get the best people and ensure that they have a pipeline of just in time talent to meet their needs. 

0:29:19 - David Williams
So where do you see this going? If you picked your timeframe five years, ten years what's the vision for the company and your impact? 

0:29:27 - Garrett Walker
Yeah, so the vision for Virb is we continue to grow on what I've just described, which is the base, which is to create the next generation of workforce for these critical roles. But a lot of the questions that you asked me earlier are part of the roadmap for Virb, which is to build a very strong community and ecosystem on our technology platform for all the people who go through the training for Virb, but also people who are interested in learning, so really to become an ecosystem and the platform supports this to come and consume content about where we are as an industry and where we're going to be able to pick and choose areas that they would like to understand for their career paths. We have mentors that are available and subject matter experts who provide that, if you will an extra bit of information you might not get from your first line manager. But, to answer your question, in five years we would like to be and we anticipate being the, if you will the largest community of healthcare professionals working in clinical research, both as experienced professionals, early career professionals. Virb will support your career and allow you to be anywhere in the ecosystem. 

You may be a full-time employee at a CRO and we think that's great. Hopefully we help get you there, but you can always rely on the platform to help you think about what's the next career move and if that career move is something within the clinical research space. We have a roadmap that you can follow. We have mentors who can help you think about it and we never charge the Virbers for any of this. So to be on the platform and to have access to your colleagues and someone who's already got five to ten years of experience all of that community exists within Virb, albeit it's fairly small now, but it's growing very quickly. Great. 

0:31:37 - David Williams
So I'm going to change the subject for my last question, which is that all of what you've been doing to build the company, have you had a chance to read any books lately? anything that you might recommend for our audience? Hey? 

0:31:51 - Garrett Walker
that's a great question. What is the most interesting book that I've read? I'm gonna give you a surprising answer, because I'm not gonna give you a business answer. I actually enjoy reading historical fiction, and so I discovered an author who writes historical fiction about New England, and this. 

This is an author, his name is James Martin, and I would recommend this book for anyone who enjoys historical fiction. It's called Annapolis and it's the history, told through two families, of the beginning of the country and then how it actually grows. And the way I would tie it to the business is the. The evolution of the two families as they grow from the formation of our country into current day follows both success and failure, but what you discover on both sides of the family story is they never give up, they're always pushing forward and They struggle, but they get where they need to go. And that is very much about what we're trying to do For students and for career changers, because it's hard, right, it's hard to break in to something new and you've got to keep trying and persevering. And that's what verbs all about, right, we, we started this company from scratch and you know, we now have, you know, a very large contract base of clients and Students and, as I think about even the short term, you ask where's the future in five years? Where's the future at, you know, on the second half of 2023? 

Yeah, we'll be launching access to the What I call the state of the art training. There is no training like the training that we have that make people ready for jobs now in clinical research, and we'll be launching what We'll call verb Academy, which will allow us to extend the offerings of What we consider to be this amazing and we know, based on feedback, is amazing training to a much larger audience that can be consumed, you know, at a, at a, at a, at a less time, consuming Wet. So, right now, all of our courses are full-time. They may run from four weeks to nine weeks and they prepare you for a job and then you go directly into that job. We're looking at providing opportunities for people who are making career changes and want to be prepared, but certainly don't have the ability to Step out for nine weeks and get trained before they go into a starting career, and that's will be verb Academy, and we're really excited about that because it's the invisible Career opportunities and clinical research that we want everyone to have access to. 

0:34:55 - David Williams
Well, garrett, spoken like a true entrepreneur. I asked you about a book. You said you're not gonna give me a business, one that we got right back into verb, which is I'm glad this is your, is your passion, and in full-time, full-time work. So, garrett Walker, co-founder and CEO of verb, thank you for spending time today with me on the health biz podcast. 

0:35:13 - Garrett Walker
Hey, thanks, david, great to see you. 

0:35:16 - David Williams
You've been listening to the health biz podcast with me, david Williams, president of health business group. I conduct in-depth interviews with leaders in health care, business and policy. If you like what you hear, go ahead and subscribe On your favorite service. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe on your second and third favorite services as well. There's more good stuff to come and you won't want to miss an episode. If your organization is seeking strategy consulting services in health care, check out our website, healthbusinessgroupcom. 

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