Yesterday we discussed how to assess your transferable skills. Today we will discuss how to “sell them” in order to market yourself toward a new career.
Think about your transferable skills in the context of your introduction, CV, and interview, and reassess your approach to each. Imagine your interviewer in a non-clinical industry. Put yourself in their shoes and think about what are they looking for in a new hire. What are their concerns when hiring somebody with little to no experience in the job at hand? You think they understand your job, but unless they are physicians they really don’t. You have to make sure to demonstrate, complete with examples, the fact that you have the skills that are necessary to perform well at the job under discussion.
You are no longer applying for clinical positions, so don’t focus on convincing a potential employer how great of a clinician you are. You can choose to say that you are well trained in removing gallbladders, or to say that you communicate a clear disease management plan, mentor a team of 8 junior physicians and students, manage a group of 6 people in the operating room, keep the team focused and calm through your leadership, maintain the management progress of other patients when dealing with calls and other interruptions in the OR. The choice here should be obvious. Then add in the number of communication deadlines that you have during the day, including the preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative notes on the cholecystectomy patient and the oral presentation that you do at grand rounds on the topic of gallbladder disease. It’s no longer about cutting out a gallbladder, something you will hopefully never have to do during a typical day in the office at your non-clinical career. It is all about providing examples that demonstrate your transferable skills applicable to the new job.
Management experience is worth an additional note here. Do you have management experience? No? Do you have office staff? Do you work in a clinic setting or an emergency room or an operating room where you teach and coordinate the activities of multiple personnel? Do you delegate certain tasks to these people? Do you then assess their performance and discuss plans for improvement? Are you involved in any financial discussions about billing, costs, overhead reduction, and practice marketing? Do you participate in hospital committees or other administrative duties? Most of you probably do a lot of these activities. You have far more management skills than you think.
Make sure these skills come across in your CV and interview discussions. Never make the assumption that the manager or interviewer already knows that you do all these things and have all these skills. You may miss your only opportunity to market yourself to them for this new career or position.
