Trainee (Digital Innovation Lab)

About the traineeship programme

The Agency is looking for motivated, qualified recent graduates or students on an Erasmus+ or other programme or PhD students or Master's students (who posses a previous degree), who are interested in gaining experience and contribute to the Agency’s work for every patient in Europe. The purpose of a traineeship at the Agency is to perform tasks that are predominantly in the interest of the trainee’s training and principally serve to increase the trainee’s knowledge and to gain relevant experience.

Placement description

We are looking for a trainee in the Digital Change Office within the Digital Business Transformation Task Force.

Specific objectives and projects

In this traineeship, you will join the Digital Innovation Lab (DigiLab) team and work on redesigning an EMA internal business process which we aim to digitalise.

In particular, you will work on digitalising the process to review names which pharmaceutical companies propose for new medicines which they introduce on the market. In this process it is important to avoid that the name of a new medicine is too similar to other medicines to avoid medication errors.  

• You will be onboarded on the Digital Innovation by design methodology which the DigiLab applies to identify, prioritise and lead great ideas for digitalisation through the innovation funnel.
• You will learn to conduct structured stakeholder interviews and collect, analyse and prioritise business needs and map business processes. 
• Once the opportunity areas to focus on have been identified, you will help facilitate co-creation design workshops in which the stakeholders and project team (including the trainee) create low fidelity wireframes (sketches) of how a potential solution could look like. Next, the prioritisation of features which the future solution should have takes place and high-fidelity wireframes are created (e.g. in MIRO) by the project team and presented back to the relevant stakeholders for validation. You will be involved in making visualisations of the proposed solution (to be process, user experience map, user interface) and in the collection of feedback from EMA stakeholders on the proposed solution.

You will learn to engage stakeholders across the Agency (including business sponsors and data scientists who will help build the solution), and throughout the innovation project, from idea collection, analysis of stakeholder needs to co-creating solutions and collection of feedback during the user testing, and finally implementation. 

Learning outcomes

You will have the opportunity to:

• Analyse a specific EMA internal business problem (root cause analysis).
• Perform a needs’ analysis of affected EMA staff and prioritise their needs. 
• Design a solution to the business problem together with relevant EMA staff.
• Make visualisations of the proposed solution (to be process, user experience map, user interface) so EMA staff affected by the proposed solution can experience how the solution would look like.
• Collect feedback from EMA staff on the proposed solution and implement the feedback in the visualisations of the solution.
• Prepare and present for a Sponsor update meeting on the final solution.

Eligibility criteria

To be eligible for consideration for this placement, you are required to:

1. enjoy full rights as a citizen of a European Union Member State or Iceland, Lichtenstein and Norway;
2. possess a university degree in any discipline (minimum of three years or more) that must have been obtained within the last 12 months (graduated between 20 May 2023 and 20 May 2024) or be a university student on an Erasmus + or a similar programme or a PhD student or a Master's student with a previous fully finished degree in the areas mentioned before.
3. a thorough knowledge of English (at least level C1) and good knowledge of other official EU language (at least B2) of the Common European Framework for Languages

For criteria 1 and 2, you will be required to provide proof in the application form and at the interview stage. Failing to present these documents may result in the disqualification from the procedure.

Additional skills

In addition to the eligibility criteria, you will have:

• Excellent presentation and communication skills.
• Pro-active approach to work.
• Analysing and creative problem-solving.
• Good in making visualisations of solutions in Power Point, or MIRO or other digital tools.
• Customer centricity.
• Team collaboration.

Behavioural Competencies

You will demonstrate the following behavioural competencies:

• Communication skills
• Interpersonal skills
• Working with others
• Adaptability
• Research and analytical skills
• Learning and development

Expected selection timelines

Conditions of traineeship

The traineeship is offered for 10 months (1 October 2024 – 31 July 2025) and takes place at the Agency’s premises in Amsterdam with possibility for teleworking up to 40% of working time from The Netherlands and occasional teleworking from outside The Netherlands. Traineeships are offered for either full-time or part-time (80% or 50%) if combined with university studies.

The Agency pays a monthly stipend of €1,858.31 for a full-time traineeship (reduced accordingly for 80% or 50%) and a travel contribution upon joining the Agency.

Each trainee will have a mentor at the Agency who will guide the trainee through the programme.

The conditions of employment are stated in the Executive Decision on rules governing the traineeship programme at the EMA available here.