Putting the spotlight on Barcelona

Maria Nicolau from Clarivate Analytics talks about life in the Barcelona office

Maria joined Clarivate Analytics three years ago as talent acquisition consultant in the Barcelona office. Her responsibility is to find the best scientists and technology specialist to support Clarivate customers in making informed decisions across the whole R&D lifecycle of a drug’s development. She recruits scientists and technology specialists from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) to fulfill roles needed under all Clarivate Analytics brands.  

Maria is an excellent ambassador for the brand and is the ideal person to explain why the Barcelona office is such an exceptional place to work.

I feel lucky every single day that I come to work. We’re located next to the Sagrada Familia, a stunning location, and Barcelona is such a friendly city. People are always smiling in our office – it is very important to me to work in a place with such great warmth and personality.

Being located here also means that our colleagues enjoy all the benefits of city living without the long commute. And of course, we also have a beach, mountains and superb weather, unlike some of our other locations!

Barcelona also has a strong culture of innovation. There are a lot of technology start-ups here, which is great for attracting the top talent. It also keeps me on my toes to make sure that they come to us. And they do — we have some brilliant people in our office.

Celebrating talent and diversity

We have more than 200 colleagues from 27 separate nationalities, which creates an interesting and diverse environment. The workforce is split approximately 55% women to 45% men and approximately half of them focus on the life sciences business, while the other half focus on the technology side applied to our life science products.

Our colleagues are extremely well qualified. In the life sciences area, 99% have a life science doctorate and lots of them have a post-doctorate. Our scientists have been educated all over the world, and they bring their expertise to us to support our customers. In summary, they use their expertise to research information of drugs before they are launched into the market.

Our Cortellis Regulatory Intelligence team supports these drug launches by investigating regulatory compliance within many countries. In fact, they speak almost 20 languages and are experts in their field. The same goes for our technology colleagues – their business analysis skills focus on the life sciences industry, and also cover some other areas across Clarivate Analytics.

Strong values

Our colleagues are really committed to what they do, and they have very strong human values. Clarivate is great at supporting these values — we offer 16 hours a year of volunteer work to every colleague.

Everyone gets involved in this and participates in the many charity events we hold at our Barcelona office. Most recently we have held a video game competition and a charity market sale, with all proceeds going to charity.

We also support the social responsibility interests of the teams. There has been a lot of concern lately about the use of plastic. As a result, we held a seminar to educate everyone on how to minimize their own personal use of plastics, as well as highlighting the impact of plastic waste on our environment.

Something special

I don’t want to boast too much, but there is certainly something special about our office.

We are like a large family – some colleagues who had left in the past have then come back. I believe it is more than just about our great location and weather.

We have some incredibly clever people here, but everyone is very humble about what they do. And we work very hard because we believe in what we do and are passionate about the difference we can make to people’s lives by accelerating new drug development.

We highly value our colleagues’ contributions to the business. One of our colleagues was with us for almost 30 years and he had a huge impact on our office. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2016. His family donated his almost 3,000 books to us, which we house in a library we created in his memory. It’s important to us to remember and value the commitment of all our colleagues.

To find out more about working at Clarivate Analytics, visit: careers.clarivate.com

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