Here Is the “Readers Digest” Version
In honor of my 200th episode, I want to tell you how to discover your first nonclinical job. But first, I will play a recent audio review from one of my listeners.
Then the rest of oday's episode is an abbreviated version of the webinar I presented last week.
I want to remind you that the Nonclinical Career Academy Membership Program has just re-opened. It had been closed to new members for six months. There are more than 20 courses for physicians looking to shift to a nonclinical career. To learn more go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/joinnca.
Our Sponsor
We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.
The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete.
By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career that you love. To find out more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.
Discover Your First Nonclinical Job
In this discussion, I describe the three steps that must be followed when pursuing a nonclinical career.
Step One
This step requires that mindset issues be addressed. These are fears and faulty beliefs that keep us from moving toward our goal of a new career. I spend a few minutes explaining why they can lead to an “upper limit problem,” and how to overcome them.
One of the biggest myths is that we don't have transferable skills. In reality, we have most of the skills needed to land almost any nonclinical position. In some cases, we need a little training in management and leadership that we can learn very quickly.
Step Two
In this step, we must discover which jobs are suited to physicians. We typically have very little exposure to the industries that employ doctors or the hundreds of specific jobs that require a medical background. During this episode, I briefly describe 15 of the most popular nonclinical careers for physicians.
Step Three
In this final step, we must put together a plan in which we…
- select our preferred position,
- engage a mentor or two,
- learn as much about it as we can,
- join pertinent professional organizations,
- prepare a complete LinkedIn profile,
- prepare a cover letter and resumé,
- find appropriate job listings,
- apply to a job that matches our goals, and
- ace our interview.
More About the Nonclinical Career Academy Membership Program
The NCA Membership Program will enable you to complete each of the above steps and discover your first nonclinical job. It is open for enrollment for only 3 days following the release of this episode. To learn more about the Membership Program go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/joinnca.
As the host of the Academy Membership Program, it is my promise to do all that I can to help you land a satisfying nonclinical or nontraditional job. That job will enable you to leave assembly-line, soul-crushing medical practice and apply your background to helping patients in a new way.
I have already dedicated hundreds of hours developing 22 courses that bring you the knowledge I’ve garnered over the past 20 years. And I will continue to add new lessons to assist you in your career journey. The Program also includes Masterclasses with Drs. Mike Woo-Ming, Andrew Wilner, and Maiysha Clairborne, and resumé expert Charlotte Weeks.
So, check it out at nonclinicalphysicians.com/joinnca.
Summary
There is a straightforward strategy for pursuing a new career. In today's podcast episode, we walk through the three major steps of that strategy.
NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode that you can download or read.
Links for Today's Episode:
- Nonclinical Career Academy Main Page
- NCA Membership Program
- How to Claim Your First Job in Industry
- How to Get Your Fabulous First MSL Job – 126
Download This Episode:
Right Click Here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.
Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton
Transcription - Discover Your First Nonclinical Job
Even If You Don't Know Where to Start
John: All right, I think we're ready to start our presentation. This is "Discover Your First Nonclinical Job Even If You Don't Know Where to Start". My name is John Jurica. Let me tell you a little bit about my story. Most of you know who I am. I'm a podcaster obviously. And I also put together a nonclinical career academy membership site for people to learn about nonclinical careers.
But I'm a family physician. And early in my career, after joining my two partners as fresh out of residency, I started doing nonclinical jobs. I was looking to moonlight and rather than do more clinical things, which I did a little bit of, I started to work in different nonclinical roles. So, I was a physician advisor for utilization management. And then I was working in a family planning clinic clinically, and then I became medical director for that.
Then I received an MPH. Well, I took the courses to get my MPH and I became the medical director for an occupational medicine clinic. And from there eventually, I moved into leadership roles at a hospital as a VPMA, and then chief medical officer.
So, I've done a lot of nonclinical activities. And when I got tired of doing that after about 15 years as a senior executive at the hospital, I decided to open an urgent care center with some other investors. And now I'm the medical director and part-owner of the clinics. There are now two clinics, but I'm only working clinically one day a week, although I'm still working as a medical director. So, in the meantime, I started this podcast and I started interviewing physicians and coaches so that I could learn how to move into nonclinical careers other than the ones that I have already done. So, I have a lot of firsthand experience and then a lot of secondhand experience through interviews and so forth.
So that's my story. And I'm here to tell you what I've determined is really a process for moving from really a non-satisfying clinical career with burnout and the risk of liability and lawsuits and all the paperwork and the owner of CMRs and so forth, and really take everything that you've learned clinically in your experience, your training, and then move into a nonclinical role, but still applying that and usually helping out lots of patients in the process. By the way, that picture was from about 15, 20 years ago. So that does not meet today. I've got a lot of gray hair these days, but I guess that only means I'm seasoned at what I'm doing.
All right. So first I wanted to tell you the secret that I learned about career transition over the period of time that I've been studying it. And really the main secret is that we have a lot of transferable skills. And the reason this is important to talk about is that it's very common for physicians to feel and to even express that all we know, all they know is medicine.
And so how can we move into some other career? It feels like we've really niched down, right? We started undergrad. We do a very broad generalized education usually. A lot of us are in liberal arts and sciences, but even if we're in some other college within a university, yeah, there's a lot of different courses. It's not very specific. And we usually have to go to graduate school or medical school or something to get more specified.
And we kind of then niche down into medicine, of course. And so that kind of separates us from other people. And I'm not saying in a necessarily supercilious way or we're any better, just narrows it down. And then as you go into your specialties, you might do a general specialty like internal medicine or family medicine, but you might go into neurology or surgery and then a subspecialty of surgery.
So, it seems like we're so "niched down" that all we know is we've spent 13, 14, 15 years learning how on earth could we just shift to something completely different, particularly something that involves management or finances or leadership or something like that.
But I think we look at it the wrong way when we do that. So, I like to use this thought experiment that you're, let's say, the last of a small group of human beings who are going to be shipwrecked or who are on the earth in some apocalyptic story. And there's a number of people in that group. There are teachers and politicians, attorneys, a judge, there might be a nurse, that could be someone who works hard labor type of job, a plumber and then there might be an engineer and a physician.
And as I thought about this kind of thinking process, like who would I want to be stranded with if I only could pick one or two partners? Well, it would be the engineer and the doctor basically. The engineer knows a lot about physical things and building things and what's safe and what's not safe, but the physician knows a lot of other things, which I'm going to talk about in a minute. And believe me, you'd want to have a physician on that team, not just because of your own chances of being injured or becoming sick, but for a lot of reasons.
So, let's go through this. Here are some of the things that physicians pretty much across the board understand and know. They have a background in physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, pharmacology, statistics, epidemiology, and a lot more. You've got these so-called soft skills. They're not really scientific, but this commitment to lifelong learning, the teaching, the presenting, the communicating, working in teams, and a whole lot more.
And then there's a personality trait. Physicians are very reliable and accountable. They have a lot of perseverance and grit, dedication. Things that employers are really looking for. And then you've got in my estimate, 70% to 80% of pretty much any nonclinical job requirements that you might need. And really the proof is almost in the pudding. If you're looking for a nonclinical job, a large percent of them fall into one of these categories and the bottom here on this slide, and it's not like this description defines exactly what the role is. But within every industry, there are physician advisors, medical directors, and chief medical officers, chief medical information officers.
But you'll notice the reason that term "physician" is in there or "medical" is in there is because the only person that can fill that role is a physician, an MD, a DO, and MBBS, whatever the equivalent is, somebody with at least that four-to-six-year background in medical school. And then oftentimes they also need to have some clinical experience in residency training and possibly board certification, but not always.
So, to think that we're not suitable for a number of these roles, I think we need to put that aside. Now, this is one of those self-limiting beliefs. And I'm going to talk more about that in a minute when I get into what are the three major areas that we need to focus on when thinking about making a pivot from clinical to a nonclinical career.
So, here are the three components that I tend to teach my mentees, my coaches, my students, and my colleagues really. One is we've got to overcome some limiting beliefs. I call them self-limiting beliefs, usually.
Next, you have to find out about the specific jobs in the most popular industries to choose from. So, I would ask you right now, can you name three popular fairly lucrative nonclinical jobs that physicians would be able to move into? I think probably most of you can, but if you can't, well, I'm going to go through about 20 of them in about two minutes. Because this is going to be maybe something to think about later, as a result just of this episode, this presentation. Have you internalized some of the things I'm telling you, by the end of this, you should be able to name at least three, if not more, nonclinical careers that are very common, very popular.
But the final part of this, maybe three-legged stool besides knowing what you're suited for and what's available, getting over your self-limiting beliefs, we've also got to understand the tactics that most job transitions require when you're moving from a clinical to a nonclinical. And some of them are very specific to that sort of thing. The others, there are general principles and changing careers, whoever you are, whatever you're doing, but there are some that are unique to physicians.
And these are the three big areas that I talk about. And we'll go into these in some detail. So, I'm basically trying to give you in one fell swoop, sort of the overarching look at how one makes the change from clinical to nonclinical.
And the thing is, this method or this approach really applies to whether you are board-certified or not. it applies to pretty much any specialty background. Now, there are certain specialties that either would tend to include you or exclude you from certain careers, but in general, any specialty can do almost any nonclinical career with a little bit of preparation.
And then whether you've pursued additional certification or an advanced degree, you can get most of these jobs without that. But at times it's beneficial to get the additional certification or degrees. But that's more or less to be more competitive. It's not necessarily something that is always required or even often required.
So, when you're done and when you do this right, when you go through the process I'm talking about today, you can understand why you're already qualified. You're going to realize that these nonclinical careers are the next logical step in your professional growth. So that's another myth or another belief that we have to get over. And the belief that we're stepping back or that the pinnacle of our career is being a physician. Well, we're always going to be a physician, but we actually can step up and forward, not down or back. We're moving to the next phase of our career like a lot of people do. If an attorney is working as a defense attorney for 20 years and then becomes a judge or a justice, they don't look at that as a step back. Well, I'm abandoning my career as an attorney. No, that's the next step forward. Well, there are lots of nonclinical careers that in that situation are exactly the same. So, as we move forward, this is actually a step up. And I've been doing nonclinical careers for a long time. I'm still called a doctor and I'm still entitled to that because most of the things that I've done, if not all of them, have helped patients, but in a different way.
So, let's move forward here. Let's go through some of these steps in more detail and dig a little bit deeper and we'll go from there. The whole step one is the whole mindset thing. And there are many people who are half-ready to start a new career. There is something called the upper limit problem that I think Gay Hendricks wrote about in a book in which you seem to be making progress, but then something holds you back. You hit a limit and you can't go beyond that. And what it turns out, is often what are these self-limiting beliefs that are related back to something that happened in your childhood and you may or may not actually remember what happened. You may not even be aware that you have this belief, but at an unconscious level, it keeps you from earning more money. It keeps you from moving to a new job. So, this is very common.
Now, some of the fears that I see that come out are fears of letting your family down. There are some cultures in particular, or in some families, where being a physician or being an attorney, being a professional at that level, those are the only options. And if you don't do that, and if you deviate from that or move beyond that, they do see it as stepping back. There's a fear of looking bad. This is just a common human self-limiting belief that if you do something else., you're going to look bad. You might fail.
Obviously, we can fail, but we need to look at failure in a different way. As physicians, we're not used to failing, we are used to making that next step, that next step, that next step, passing each test, doing well. When I applied to medical school, I was rejected the first time. So, I understood what that failure was, but I just overcame that, kept working, studying, took some additional classes, retook the MCATs, moved on, and was accepted.
But that doesn't happen to most people. They have a string of successes from grammar school, high school, get into college, get into medical school, get into residency, and so forth. And then there's that fear of "I'm not good enough" and the fear of financial ruin. Now, many of you are making good money if you're full-time working in your intended career after residency and passing your boards and so forth, and you may have loans out there and a lot of expenses and you need to make a lot of money. But remember, it's at the expense if you're listening to this of near burnout, no fulfillment, the feeling like you're just churning patients. And so, we need to rethink how we look at that.
But the bottom line is that a lot of these things relate back to this statement that you don't have the necessary skills or expertise to do anything else that we started with. If you feel that way, then you're going to feel as though you're looking bad. You're not really doing the right thing. You're going to feel that you're going to fail because you don't have the necessary skills. You're going to feel that you're not good enough, or that you're not going to make enough money because you're not going to get that next job.
So, two things on this. The first one, the fear of letting people down, I would say, have a conversation with your loved ones and say I'm miserable. I really don't like what I'm doing for a variety of reasons. I've been burned out. I've been depressed. Whatever it is, unfulfilled, 99.9% of the time, your loved ones are going to say, "Sweetheart, do what is best for you. And if you can do it using what you've learned, fine". But do something that helps you, or allows you to work within your zone of genius and help people and not be stuck in some job that you hate. Nobody should do that. So, I think you'll find that your family will support you.
And then as far as the other things, the financial. You might have a temporary reduction. So, you've got to plan ahead. You shouldn't just stop working and then start looking for a job. A lot of these things, you can overlap very easily. Don't do anything foolish, but at the same time, you are a physician. They're not going to be able to pay a physician the salary of someone else that does not have that medical degree and doesn't have that background and experience. It might be a little less, but you're going to be working less hours. You are going to have no call. You're not going to be liable for a lawsuit. You're going to have so many other upsides that even if there's a small downside financially, it's really a good trade-off.
And then ultimately, usually you're going to get increases in pay whether it's normally through your employment and raises every year, or if you're a hospital administrator, something like that, you're going to have deferred comp and all kinds of things coming in. And really there's a lot of jobs that pay more than you are paid as a physician unless you're just really super hard-working, extremely busy, specialty surgeon, or interventional cardiologist or something like that.
All right. So that's step one. And obviously, I'm not going to get you through that step in just five minutes, but I think you have to try to think about what we've talked about and do some introspection and see if these things make sense to you.
Now, step two is a lot of people who move towards a job change. They're like, "Well, what do I do?" It's one of the most common comments I get in the Facebook group where I'm a moderator, the Physician Nonclinical Career Hunters Facebook group. And it's like, I don't know what to do. And the other members of the group when the new member says that they find it a little bit ironic because they've been exposed through the group to dozens and dozens of different jobs, different industries. And it's really a typical, and it's expected question, and that's why step two is to find out what's out there, what's available.
Do you have to find out every single job that any physician has ever done in any industry? No, but you should be exposed to at least 20 or 30 different jobs in 5 or 10 different industries so you can see what meshes with your personality and so forth.
So, I'm going to go through and list some of the jobs that I've talked about in the past that I hear about that I study and that I present, for example, in my Nonclinical Career Academy membership site. So, these are very common. Utilization management, probably the number one job in the Facebook group. That can be done at an insurance company, but it also can be done in the hospital setting. In fact, that's where it grew out of. You can be a hospital medical director for quality improvement, for CDI, which also has medical advisors, for utilization management, for informatics, not to mention all of the service lines where you can be a medical director.
And then you can move up to a chief medical officer, chief quality officer, chief medical information officer. And those are very high-paying jobs, a lot of responsibility, and a lot of impact on patients at the hospital where you're working. There are at least six types of medical writers, and you can do those jobs either as a freelancer or as an employee. So, there are 12 different iterations right there.
And then there's another medical writing job called medical communications, which I kind of carve-out usually because it's working for an ad agency to help pharmaceutical companies get the word out, get the word out on their new medications and existing medications and expansion of the applications of their medicines. And so, if you think about that, this is one of the overlaps between medical writing and the pharma industry, which I'll talk about in a minute.
Another one that's come up recently. I just put it in here. It's not the most common but accrediting organizations need physicians. Oftentimes they need physicians to be surveyors where they can get paid to do that. That's usually part-time, or they can be management in those companies. The ACCME, the accreditation council for CME. The leader of that has always been a physician. The ACGME, I believe, has always been led by a physician and they have surveyors. There are all kinds. The Joint Commission has a surveyor. There are jobs for physicians there because they know medicine.
And so when they're dealing with physicians in these institutions that they're serving, they have physicians that can speak their language and they get a little more respect when they're teaching them or trying to show them how they should be doing something when they've had an issue.
Insurance medicine is a big one. There are not as many jobs there, but there are definitely medical directors and there is a society of physicians for insurance medicine. So, it's definitely a bona fide and very popular job and physicians don't leave that job because it's very intellectually stimulating. And yet, it's very reasonable in terms of the lifestyle.
You got medical consulting. Now, when I usually talk about this, I'm talking about working for a big healthcare or management company like McKinsey or Accenture or BCG or Huron, or there are probably at least 15 of them. And there's lots and lots of jobs, but you could also be a freelance consultant yourself as a consultant I guess I should say, and you can teach other physicians about how to run their practice or how to do the finances or how to do branding for their practice. I've interviewed physicians doing all of those things.
Then in pharma, you've got medical directors, basically, in the medical affairs division, you've got medical science liaisons, or an MSL, which is a very popular position. That's open to physicians who have not gone through residency. Medical monitor. Oh, by the way, these jobs are also open to physicians who do have residency like the medical science liaison, the medical monitor, but they will take both depending on your background, for sure. Medical safety or pharmacovigilance, they need physicians and pharma for that.
Then we'll shift gears totally to expert witnesses, which is usually a part-time job. And you can cut your practice in half, see patients 20 hours a week and do medical expert witness job type work, chart reviews, and depositions 10 hours a week, and make a much higher total salary than you would just by practicing alone in most specialties.
There's a lot of home-based careers. There are some of these overlaps like the UM and even the CDI consulting, they can be done from home because of EMRs and so forth. But there are others, there are independent review organizations that you can do reviews offline or online with different disability companies and workers comp. And you can even go to state medical societies and do quality reviews on charts. So, it's a lot of home-based careers and we call them remote control careers sometimes.
And then physician coaching is a huge one. There are probably 10 or 12 different types of coaching from life coaching to career coaching and business coaching. But with that, you get to be like a physician in terms of what you're doing and how you're helping people, but there's almost no liability. There's no call. It's a much better lifestyle.
So, you need to review and get exposed to what's out there. The pros and cons of each. Does it involve travel? Does it involve other things that would not fit with your lifestyle? I have an example here of someone that followed my process. He was not residency trained. He came to this country as a foreign medical graduate. He tried to get into residency and he couldn't.
If you look at the bottom and work your way up, this is just a LinkedIn profile. And you can see that he was working as a medical assistant, but he did have the medical background for medical school. And then he became a scribe. And then he began working as a medical case manager, almost like a nurse and utilization review specialist, but he was in the hospital setting. He was exposed. He was networking. He was getting mentored by physicians who would help advise him and how he might move into something more lucrative and have more responsibility. And he was able after taking a short course on ICD-10 to get a job as a clinical documentation specialist, as a physician. So, he was there on sort of a level playing field with other physician CDI specialists and he carried forth on that. He was working for a larger company remotely, and he really enjoyed it.
You have to overcome that knowledge gap about available opportunities. So, what are the most popular industries? What positions exist in those? And then what are their characteristics? As I said a minute ago, are they remote? Are they face to face? Are they in an employed situation? Are they freelance? Are they 09:00 to 05:00 or are they flexible? So, which job fits you best? As you become aware of more jobs, you have a bigger choice of those that will fit with you.
And then the next step, of course, is where do you find those jobs and how do you find those jobs? So, if you do this right, you're going to start with this big overview. You're going to understand the differences. You're going to see if they align with your preferences as noted on this slide. And you can begin to identify how prepared you are and what additional education certification or degree you might need if any.
And another physician that was an OB, who really was unhappy and she looked around and she found through her studies that she liked to write. She knew that, and she took a course to help her set up her LLC for her freelance writing. And she did that for several years, developed relationships. She was doing that while she was working as pretty much a full-time laborist.
And then at one point after really making some good money on the side as a medical writer, she was contacted through LinkedIn about a job for a contract research organization CRO, which usually is providing support to pharmaceutical companies and they needed a technical writer.
And although she hadn't been a technical writer, she was definitely a good writer and she applied for the job and she got it very quickly and that worked out great and she stopped seeing patients clinically. So that's just another example. And it's an example of the kind of thing that you can do if you apply yourself and follow the principles that I'm talking about today.
Now, step three is, I could say to come up with a plan, but really the plan has so many little steps in it that I'll mention here in a second. But basically, some of the steps here, and I'll go back. This just shows you what a plan could look like. This would be a one-year plan that would probably work out pretty well.
The beginning is addressing the self-limiting beliefs, starting to look at job descriptions, really not so much because you want to apply, but because you just want to understand what they list in there, what's critically important for each type of job you might be choosing or thinking about choosing.
Early on, you should get a mentor. You should get a full LinkedIn profile set up and so forth. I'll go through this in the next slide. But each month or two, you can do additional steps in this process. Some of these are ongoing. Some of these you only do as you get towards the end of the process. So, at some point, you're going to have to put together a resume and a cover letter. You're going to have to make that very personal. You are going to have to switch it from a CV to a resume. And there's a big difference between the two. And then you're going to have to really narrow it down to where you're going to look, how you're going to send those materials in, and how to prepare for, let's say, a telephone or a video call, how to prepare for your interview.
So, I've listed these here. In the meantime, you will join professional organizations if there are any because they can help you. They can add more evidence and different courses and information about getting a job. Some of them have job boards. As I mentioned, you're going to complete your LinkedIn profile. You're going to network constantly. And you're going to network in a way that is not like staying after a meeting and having a drink in a conference room and just small talk and hand out your cards. No, you're going to network with people you already know, try and find contacts that they'd have other contacts in the industry you're looking for.
And then you need to learn the jargon. And then if you have to, you can say, well, maybe I need some additional courses or certifications or degrees. But again, I advise people that it's okay to take some additional courses, but if I were you and you're going to look for a degree, I'd probably start work on a degree while you're looking at that job. And with any luck, you can land the job while you're still in the process of getting the degree, and then maybe you can get your employer to help pay for it. So, there's a whole strategy there.
And like I said, the cover letter, the resume, and how to prepare for your interviews, and how to do research on the organization that you're interviewing with is a big deal as well. So, this is a big step. Step three has a lot of moving parts in it, but there's a science between each of them and there are experts that can be accessed. So, you put it all together and you look at the steps. You may already have a perfect LinkedIn profile, but maybe your resume needs some improvement. There are some things we can do together to do that. Or maybe you hire someone to look at your resume. It's not that expensive. And if you use someone who knows how to design a resume for this kind of job, it's probably worth it. And you probably want to write down some kind of a visual map of your plan. You might call it a Gantt chart or some process where you say, "Here's what I'm going to get done in week one, week two, month one, month two, month three, and so forth. So, there is a science to it.
Anyway, when you do it right you can make your career shift, get away from burnout, less stress, wake up in the morning, looking forward to work instead of dreading it, and you'll have the skills necessary if you listen to what I'm saying today, or learn more at the membership site that I'm going to talk about so that you can do this over and over again, that slide that I showed here actually can be reiterated each time. You can do it for the first job, the second job, the third job, it gets a little easier each time. Your advancement usually goes a little quicker when you're willing to make the change to a new job, but there are still great opportunities within organizations to move up as well.
So, I have a mentee, someone that I mentored and coached, and it was actually a friend of mine as well. We worked at the same organization. And he had reached the end of his career. I mean, he could have continued to work as a cardiothoracic surgeon, but he saw the writing on the wall. The number of open-heart surgeries was declining as the cardiologist became more and more aggressive in what they could do. A transcutaneous I guess is how I would put it. And he was a good leader and he ran some good programs and during the last two years of his work at the hospital as a surgeon, he did most of his online MBA, a very well-respected one.
And he was able to get a position as a physician advisor. I think it was a lot more than a physician advisor in the sense that he was doing not only helping with UM but quality improvement. And he was involved in root cause analysis. He had learned a lot about quality improvement in his role as the medical director for the cardiac program. So again, he just applied the same principles. He didn't have to do a lot of interviews. He just approached one of the hospitals they had privileges at, and he was able to move right into that position once he decided to stop working clinically, and he's still helping people provide in his hospital to provide really good patient care. So, it can be done. He has the know-how and confidence to apply to his next position if he decides to move on.
And it should be pretty obvious now that there's a series of logical steps that are best done in a deliberate way if you want to move forward from your clinical till your nonclinical. You should never just quit a job without a plan. Some people have done that successfully, but most of those have had big nest eggs that can tie them over. You really want to do small pivots. You want to do pilots. You want to do things part-time, do things on the side if you can. In the hospital setting, you can volunteer for things. And you do learn management by being the chair of a committee or two, and then working on the board, if you have an opportunity for that. So, there are ways to do it that I teach my students.
So, to reiterate, we're going to overcome the self-limiting beliefs and develop confidence in your transferable skills, which you have many of. You are going to identify some potential careers that will build on your education and training. Then you're going to become an expert at the tactics. You need to make that shift from using a mentor and networking to preparing your resume and acing your interview.
So, the other thing that's important here. And so, we're getting to the end of this part of it. And it's just to say that not wasting your time chasing useless information. This is one of the things that's a benefit of having a mentor or a coach sometimes, or a teacher or whatever you want to call that person. It's just to avoid the landmines, avoid the big mistakes that slow your progress.
And so, that is what I wanted to share with you. And especially in honor of my 200 episodes, I've kind of boiled down a lot of what I've learned in the last 30 minutes, just to give you a broad overview. And this is the path to a new fulfilling career that I want you to understand. And if you need help with that, then you should consider joining the Nonclinical Career Academy membership program. It just reopened recently. And so, if you'll indulge me for just a minute or two longer, let me tell you more about it.
So, think about what it would be like if you could find the career that you love, overcome burnout and experience joy and balance in your life and avoid another frivolous lawsuit. And feel like you're still in a career based on your medical knowledge and training. And that's why I developed the Nonclinical Career Academy so that I can help you to move in that direction quickly and conveniently.
The NCA membership program started as 12 courses back almost two years ago. Now with 22 in 7 major categories. Introductory, getting started, the important tactics. And then there are some really specific things about hospital management medical science liaison. There's a six-lesson course there that could pretty much get you fully into a position to interview and land your first job, locum tenens, and consulting.
And I set it up as a membership because then there's unlimited access to all the courses at whatever time you are available to do it. I could sell the courses individually, but I continue to add courses every couple of months or so. And a lot of that's based on the feedback I get. So, if this sounds like something that is interesting to you, then definitely to nonclinicalphysicians.com/joinnca and just look around. That's just a homepage where you can look and see there are a lot more details about it. And with the program, you can do these things. You can avoid burnout, you can move on, eliminate your lawsuits and be happy, basically, using your medical knowledge and experience.
The program does have a seven-day money-back guarantee. So, you can go in there and look around and see if it's really what you think will help you on your journey. And I've had many members who have been in it for over a year. But you can get in there and get three, four or five months under your belt, find that next career and move on. And that'll be a lot less expensive than buying a $3,000 or $4,000 or $5,000 course with this much content in it. And you only have to use the parts that you want to use and you'll have access for as long as you're a member.
The membership site closes on the 18th, Friday, the 18th of June. To learn more, just go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/joinnca. Check it out. And if it's something that you think is going to be helpful, sign up, look it over. If you don't like it, you can withdraw. Otherwise, start going through it. And let's get you on course to get your first nonclinical or non-traditional job and have you moved up to that next phase of your nonclinical professional life.
Sign up to receive email reminders, news, and free stuff every week!
Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you reminders each podcast episode, notices about nonclinical jobs, information about free and paid courses, and other curated information just for you.
Transcription - Discover Your First Nonclinical Job
Even If You Don't Know Where to Start
John: All right, I think we're ready to start our presentation. This is "Discover Your First Nonclinical Job Even If You Don't Know Where to Start". My name is John Jurica. Let me tell you a little bit about my story. Most of you know who I am. I'm a podcaster obviously. And I also put together a nonclinical career academy membership site for people to learn about nonclinical careers.
But I'm a family physician. And early in my career, after joining my two partners as fresh out of residency, I started doing nonclinical jobs. I was looking to moonlight and rather than do more clinical things, which I did a little bit of, I started to work in different nonclinical roles. So, I was a physician advisor for utilization management. And then I was working in a family planning clinic clinically, and then I became medical director for that.
Then I received an MPH. Well, I took the courses to get my MPH and I became the medical director for an occupational medicine clinic. And from there eventually, I moved into leadership roles at a hospital as a VPMA, and then chief medical officer.
So, I've done a lot of nonclinical activities. And when I got tired of doing that after about 15 years as a senior executive at the hospital, I decided to open an urgent care center with some other investors. And now I'm the medical director and part-owner of the clinics. There are now two clinics, but I'm only working clinically one day a week, although I'm still working as a medical director. So, in the meantime, I started this podcast and I started interviewing physicians and coaches so that I could learn how to move into nonclinical careers other than the ones that I have already done. So, I have a lot of firsthand experience and then a lot of secondhand experience through interviews and so forth.
So that's my story. And I'm here to tell you what I've determined is really a process for moving from really a non-satisfying clinical career with burnout and the risk of liability and lawsuits and all the paperwork and the owner of CMRs and so forth, and really take everything that you've learned clinically in your experience, your training, and then move into a nonclinical role, but still applying that and usually helping out lots of patients in the process. By the way, that picture was from about 15, 20 years ago. So that does not meet today. I've got a lot of gray hair these days, but I guess that only means I'm seasoned at what I'm doing.
All right. So first I wanted to tell you the secret that I learned about career transition over the period of time that I've been studying it. And really the main secret is that we have a lot of transferable skills. And the reason this is important to talk about is that it's very common for physicians to feel and to even express that all we know, all they know is medicine.
And so how can we move into some other career? It feels like we've really niched down, right? We started undergrad. We do a very broad generalized education usually. A lot of us are in liberal arts and sciences, but even if we're in some other college within a university, yeah, there's a lot of different courses. It's not very specific. And we usually have to go to graduate school or medical school or something to get more specified.
And we kind of then niche down into medicine, of course. And so that kind of separates us from other people. And I'm not saying in a necessarily supercilious way or we're any better, just narrows it down. And then as you go into your specialties, you might do a general specialty like internal medicine or family medicine, but you might go into neurology or surgery and then a subspecialty of surgery.
So, it seems like we're so "niched down" that all we know is we've spent 13, 14, 15 years learning how on earth could we just shift to something completely different, particularly something that involves management or finances or leadership or something like that.
But I think we look at it the wrong way when we do that. So, I like to use this thought experiment that you're, let's say, the last of a small group of human beings who are going to be shipwrecked or who are on the earth in some apocalyptic story. And there's a number of people in that group. There are teachers and politicians, attorneys, a judge, there might be a nurse, that could be someone who works hard labor type of job, a plumber and then there might be an engineer and a physician.
And as I thought about this kind of thinking process, like who would I want to be stranded with if I only could pick one or two partners? Well, it would be the engineer and the doctor basically. The engineer knows a lot about physical things and building things and what's safe and what's not safe, but the physician knows a lot of other things, which I'm going to talk about in a minute. And believe me, you'd want to have a physician on that team, not just because of your own chances of being injured or becoming sick, but for a lot of reasons.
So, let's go through this. Here are some of the things that physicians pretty much across the board understand and know. They have a background in physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, pharmacology, statistics, epidemiology, and a lot more. You've got these so-called soft skills. They're not really scientific, but this commitment to lifelong learning, the teaching, the presenting, the communicating, working in teams, and a whole lot more.
And then there's a personality trait. Physicians are very reliable and accountable. They have a lot of perseverance and grit, dedication. Things that employers are really looking for. And then you've got in my estimate, 70% to 80% of pretty much any nonclinical job requirements that you might need. And really the proof is almost in the pudding. If you're looking for a nonclinical job, a large percent of them fall into one of these categories and the bottom here on this slide, and it's not like this description defines exactly what the role is. But within every industry, there are physician advisors, medical directors, and chief medical officers, chief medical information officers.
But you'll notice the reason that term "physician" is in there or "medical" is in there is because the only person that can fill that role is a physician, an MD, a DO, and MBBS, whatever the equivalent is, somebody with at least that four-to-six-year background in medical school. And then oftentimes they also need to have some clinical experience in residency training and possibly board certification, but not always.
So, to think that we're not suitable for a number of these roles, I think we need to put that aside. Now, this is one of those self-limiting beliefs. And I'm going to talk more about that in a minute when I get into what are the three major areas that we need to focus on when thinking about making a pivot from clinical to a nonclinical career.
So, here are the three components that I tend to teach my mentees, my coaches, my students, and my colleagues really. One is we've got to overcome some limiting beliefs. I call them self-limiting beliefs, usually.
Next, you have to find out about the specific jobs in the most popular industries to choose from. So, I would ask you right now, can you name three popular fairly lucrative nonclinical jobs that physicians would be able to move into? I think probably most of you can, but if you can't, well, I'm going to go through about 20 of them in about two minutes. Because this is going to be maybe something to think about later, as a result just of this episode, this presentation. Have you internalized some of the things I'm telling you, by the end of this, you should be able to name at least three, if not more, nonclinical careers that are very common, very popular.
But the final part of this, maybe three-legged stool besides knowing what you're suited for and what's available, getting over your self-limiting beliefs, we've also got to understand the tactics that most job transitions require when you're moving from a clinical to a nonclinical. And some of them are very specific to that sort of thing. The others, there are general principles and changing careers, whoever you are, whatever you're doing, but there are some that are unique to physicians.
And these are the three big areas that I talk about. And we'll go into these in some detail. So, I'm basically trying to give you in one fell swoop, sort of the overarching look at how one makes the change from clinical to nonclinical.
And the thing is, this method or this approach really applies to whether you are board-certified or not. it applies to pretty much any specialty background. Now, there are certain specialties that either would tend to include you or exclude you from certain careers, but in general, any specialty can do almost any nonclinical career with a little bit of preparation.
And then whether you've pursued additional certification or an advanced degree, you can get most of these jobs without that. But at times it's beneficial to get the additional certification or degrees. But that's more or less to be more competitive. It's not necessarily something that is always required or even often required.
So, when you're done and when you do this right, when you go through the process I'm talking about today, you can understand why you're already qualified. You're going to realize that these nonclinical careers are the next logical step in your professional growth. So that's another myth or another belief that we have to get over. And the belief that we're stepping back or that the pinnacle of our career is being a physician. Well, we're always going to be a physician, but we actually can step up and forward, not down or back. We're moving to the next phase of our career like a lot of people do. If an attorney is working as a defense attorney for 20 years and then becomes a judge or a justice, they don't look at that as a step back. Well, I'm abandoning my career as an attorney. No, that's the next step forward. Well, there are lots of nonclinical careers that in that situation are exactly the same. So, as we move forward, this is actually a step up. And I've been doing nonclinical careers for a long time. I'm still called a doctor and I'm still entitled to that because most of the things that I've done, if not all of them, have helped patients, but in a different way.
So, let's move forward here. Let's go through some of these steps in more detail and dig a little bit deeper and we'll go from there. The whole step one is the whole mindset thing. And there are many people who are half-ready to start a new career. There is something called the upper limit problem that I think Gay Hendricks wrote about in a book in which you seem to be making progress, but then something holds you back. You hit a limit and you can't go beyond that. And what it turns out, is often what are these self-limiting beliefs that are related back to something that happened in your childhood and you may or may not actually remember what happened. You may not even be aware that you have this belief, but at an unconscious level, it keeps you from earning more money. It keeps you from moving to a new job. So, this is very common.
Now, some of the fears that I see that come out are fears of letting your family down. There are some cultures in particular, or in some families, where being a physician or being an attorney, being a professional at that level, those are the only options. And if you don't do that, and if you deviate from that or move beyond that, they do see it as stepping back. There's a fear of looking bad. This is just a common human self-limiting belief that if you do something else., you're going to look bad. You might fail.
Obviously, we can fail, but we need to look at failure in a different way. As physicians, we're not used to failing, we are used to making that next step, that next step, that next step, passing each test, doing well. When I applied to medical school, I was rejected the first time. So, I understood what that failure was, but I just overcame that, kept working, studying, took some additional classes, retook the MCATs, moved on, and was accepted.
But that doesn't happen to most people. They have a string of successes from grammar school, high school, get into college, get into medical school, get into residency, and so forth. And then there's that fear of "I'm not good enough" and the fear of financial ruin. Now, many of you are making good money if you're full-time working in your intended career after residency and passing your boards and so forth, and you may have loans out there and a lot of expenses and you need to make a lot of money. But remember, it's at the expense if you're listening to this of near burnout, no fulfillment, the feeling like you're just churning patients. And so, we need to rethink how we look at that.
But the bottom line is that a lot of these things relate back to this statement that you don't have the necessary skills or expertise to do anything else that we started with. If you feel that way, then you're going to feel as though you're looking bad. You're not really doing the right thing. You're going to feel that you're going to fail because you don't have the necessary skills. You're going to feel that you're not good enough, or that you're not going to make enough money because you're not going to get that next job.
So, two things on this. The first one, the fear of letting people down, I would say, have a conversation with your loved ones and say I'm miserable. I really don't like what I'm doing for a variety of reasons. I've been burned out. I've been depressed. Whatever it is, unfulfilled, 99.9% of the time, your loved ones are going to say, "Sweetheart, do what is best for you. And if you can do it using what you've learned, fine". But do something that helps you, or allows you to work within your zone of genius and help people and not be stuck in some job that you hate. Nobody should do that. So, I think you'll find that your family will support you.
And then as far as the other things, the financial. You might have a temporary reduction. So, you've got to plan ahead. You shouldn't just stop working and then start looking for a job. A lot of these things, you can overlap very easily. Don't do anything foolish, but at the same time, you are a physician. They're not going to be able to pay a physician the salary of someone else that does not have that medical degree and doesn't have that background and experience. It might be a little less, but you're going to be working less hours. You are going to have no call. You're not going to be liable for a lawsuit. You're going to have so many other upsides that even if there's a small downside financially, it's really a good trade-off.
And then ultimately, usually you're going to get increases in pay whether it's normally through your employment and raises every year, or if you're a hospital administrator, something like that, you're going to have deferred comp and all kinds of things coming in. And really there's a lot of jobs that pay more than you are paid as a physician unless you're just really super hard-working, extremely busy, specialty surgeon, or interventional cardiologist or something like that.
All right. So that's step one. And obviously, I'm not going to get you through that step in just five minutes, but I think you have to try to think about what we've talked about and do some introspection and see if these things make sense to you.
Now, step two is a lot of people who move towards a job change. They're like, "Well, what do I do?" It's one of the most common comments I get in the Facebook group where I'm a moderator, the Physician Nonclinical Career Hunters Facebook group. And it's like, I don't know what to do. And the other members of the group when the new member says that they find it a little bit ironic because they've been exposed through the group to dozens and dozens of different jobs, different industries. And it's really a typical, and it's expected question, and that's why step two is to find out what's out there, what's available.
Do you have to find out every single job that any physician has ever done in any industry? No, but you should be exposed to at least 20 or 30 different jobs in 5 or 10 different industries so you can see what meshes with your personality and so forth.
So, I'm going to go through and list some of the jobs that I've talked about in the past that I hear about that I study and that I present, for example, in my Nonclinical Career Academy membership site. So, these are very common. Utilization management, probably the number one job in the Facebook group. That can be done at an insurance company, but it also can be done in the hospital setting. In fact, that's where it grew out of. You can be a hospital medical director for quality improvement, for CDI, which also has medical advisors, for utilization management, for informatics, not to mention all of the service lines where you can be a medical director.
And then you can move up to a chief medical officer, chief quality officer, chief medical information officer. And those are very high-paying jobs, a lot of responsibility, and a lot of impact on patients at the hospital where you're working. There are at least six types of medical writers, and you can do those jobs either as a freelancer or as an employee. So, there are 12 different iterations right there.
And then there's another medical writing job called medical communications, which I kind of carve-out usually because it's working for an ad agency to help pharmaceutical companies get the word out, get the word out on their new medications and existing medications and expansion of the applications of their medicines. And so, if you think about that, this is one of the overlaps between medical writing and the pharma industry, which I'll talk about in a minute.
Another one that's come up recently. I just put it in here. It's not the most common but accrediting organizations need physicians. Oftentimes they need physicians to be surveyors where they can get paid to do that. That's usually part-time, or they can be management in those companies. The ACCME, the accreditation council for CME. The leader of that has always been a physician. The ACGME, I believe, has always been led by a physician and they have surveyors. There are all kinds. The Joint Commission has a surveyor. There are jobs for physicians there because they know medicine.
And so when they're dealing with physicians in these institutions that they're serving, they have physicians that can speak their language and they get a little more respect when they're teaching them or trying to show them how they should be doing something when they've had an issue.
Insurance medicine is a big one. There are not as many jobs there, but there are definitely medical directors and there is a society of physicians for insurance medicine. So, it's definitely a bona fide and very popular job and physicians don't leave that job because it's very intellectually stimulating. And yet, it's very reasonable in terms of the lifestyle.
You got medical consulting. Now, when I usually talk about this, I'm talking about working for a big healthcare or management company like McKinsey or Accenture or BCG or Huron, or there are probably at least 15 of them. And there's lots and lots of jobs, but you could also be a freelance consultant yourself as a consultant I guess I should say, and you can teach other physicians about how to run their practice or how to do the finances or how to do branding for their practice. I've interviewed physicians doing all of those things.
Then in pharma, you've got medical directors, basically, in the medical affairs division, you've got medical science liaisons, or an MSL, which is a very popular position. That's open to physicians who have not gone through residency. Medical monitor. Oh, by the way, these jobs are also open to physicians who do have residency like the medical science liaison, the medical monitor, but they will take both depending on your background, for sure. Medical safety or pharmacovigilance, they need physicians and pharma for that.
Then we'll shift gears totally to expert witnesses, which is usually a part-time job. And you can cut your practice in half, see patients 20 hours a week and do medical expert witness job type work, chart reviews, and depositions 10 hours a week, and make a much higher total salary than you would just by practicing alone in most specialties.
There's a lot of home-based careers. There are some of these overlaps like the UM and even the CDI consulting, they can be done from home because of EMRs and so forth. But there are others, there are independent review organizations that you can do reviews offline or online with different disability companies and workers comp. And you can even go to state medical societies and do quality reviews on charts. So, it's a lot of home-based careers and we call them remote control careers sometimes.
And then physician coaching is a huge one. There are probably 10 or 12 different types of coaching from life coaching to career coaching and business coaching. But with that, you get to be like a physician in terms of what you're doing and how you're helping people, but there's almost no liability. There's no call. It's a much better lifestyle.
So, you need to review and get exposed to what's out there. The pros and cons of each. Does it involve travel? Does it involve other things that would not fit with your lifestyle? I have an example here of someone that followed my process. He was not residency trained. He came to this country as a foreign medical graduate. He tried to get into residency and he couldn't.
If you look at the bottom and work your way up, this is just a LinkedIn profile. And you can see that he was working as a medical assistant, but he did have the medical background for medical school. And then he became a scribe. And then he began working as a medical case manager, almost like a nurse and utilization review specialist, but he was in the hospital setting. He was exposed. He was networking. He was getting mentored by physicians who would help advise him and how he might move into something more lucrative and have more responsibility. And he was able after taking a short course on ICD-10 to get a job as a clinical documentation specialist, as a physician. So, he was there on sort of a level playing field with other physician CDI specialists and he carried forth on that. He was working for a larger company remotely, and he really enjoyed it.
You have to overcome that knowledge gap about available opportunities. So, what are the most popular industries? What positions exist in those? And then what are their characteristics? As I said a minute ago, are they remote? Are they face to face? Are they in an employed situation? Are they freelance? Are they 09:00 to 05:00 or are they flexible? So, which job fits you best? As you become aware of more jobs, you have a bigger choice of those that will fit with you.
And then the next step, of course, is where do you find those jobs and how do you find those jobs? So, if you do this right, you're going to start with this big overview. You're going to understand the differences. You're going to see if they align with your preferences as noted on this slide. And you can begin to identify how prepared you are and what additional education certification or degree you might need if any.
And another physician that was an OB, who really was unhappy and she looked around and she found through her studies that she liked to write. She knew that, and she took a course to help her set up her LLC for her freelance writing. And she did that for several years, developed relationships. She was doing that while she was working as pretty much a full-time laborist.
And then at one point after really making some good money on the side as a medical writer, she was contacted through LinkedIn about a job for a contract research organization CRO, which usually is providing support to pharmaceutical companies and they needed a technical writer.
And although she hadn't been a technical writer, she was definitely a good writer and she applied for the job and she got it very quickly and that worked out great and she stopped seeing patients clinically. So that's just another example. And it's an example of the kind of thing that you can do if you apply yourself and follow the principles that I'm talking about today.
Now, step three is, I could say to come up with a plan, but really the plan has so many little steps in it that I'll mention here in a second. But basically, some of the steps here, and I'll go back. This just shows you what a plan could look like. This would be a one-year plan that would probably work out pretty well.
The beginning is addressing the self-limiting beliefs, starting to look at job descriptions, really not so much because you want to apply, but because you just want to understand what they list in there, what's critically important for each type of job you might be choosing or thinking about choosing.
Early on, you should get a mentor. You should get a full LinkedIn profile set up and so forth. I'll go through this in the next slide. But each month or two, you can do additional steps in this process. Some of these are ongoing. Some of these you only do as you get towards the end of the process. So, at some point, you're going to have to put together a resume and a cover letter. You're going to have to make that very personal. You are going to have to switch it from a CV to a resume. And there's a big difference between the two. And then you're going to have to really narrow it down to where you're going to look, how you're going to send those materials in, and how to prepare for, let's say, a telephone or a video call, how to prepare for your interview.
So, I've listed these here. In the meantime, you will join professional organizations if there are any because they can help you. They can add more evidence and different courses and information about getting a job. Some of them have job boards. As I mentioned, you're going to complete your LinkedIn profile. You're going to network constantly. And you're going to network in a way that is not like staying after a meeting and having a drink in a conference room and just small talk and hand out your cards. No, you're going to network with people you already know, try and find contacts that they'd have other contacts in the industry you're looking for.
And then you need to learn the jargon. And then if you have to, you can say, well, maybe I need some additional courses or certifications or degrees. But again, I advise people that it's okay to take some additional courses, but if I were you and you're going to look for a degree, I'd probably start work on a degree while you're looking at that job. And with any luck, you can land the job while you're still in the process of getting the degree, and then maybe you can get your employer to help pay for it. So, there's a whole strategy there.
And like I said, the cover letter, the resume, and how to prepare for your interviews, and how to do research on the organization that you're interviewing with is a big deal as well. So, this is a big step. Step three has a lot of moving parts in it, but there's a science between each of them and there are experts that can be accessed. So, you put it all together and you look at the steps. You may already have a perfect LinkedIn profile, but maybe your resume needs some improvement. There are some things we can do together to do that. Or maybe you hire someone to look at your resume. It's not that expensive. And if you use someone who knows how to design a resume for this kind of job, it's probably worth it. And you probably want to write down some kind of a visual map of your plan. You might call it a Gantt chart or some process where you say, "Here's what I'm going to get done in week one, week two, month one, month two, month three, and so forth. So, there is a science to it.
Anyway, when you do it right you can make your career shift, get away from burnout, less stress, wake up in the morning, looking forward to work instead of dreading it, and you'll have the skills necessary if you listen to what I'm saying today, or learn more at the membership site that I'm going to talk about so that you can do this over and over again, that slide that I showed here actually can be reiterated each time. You can do it for the first job, the second job, the third job, it gets a little easier each time. Your advancement usually goes a little quicker when you're willing to make the change to a new job, but there are still great opportunities within organizations to move up as well.
So, I have a mentee, someone that I mentored and coached, and it was actually a friend of mine as well. We worked at the same organization. And he had reached the end of his career. I mean, he could have continued to work as a cardiothoracic surgeon, but he saw the writing on the wall. The number of open-heart surgeries was declining as the cardiologist became more and more aggressive in what they could do. A transcutaneous I guess is how I would put it. And he was a good leader and he ran some good programs and during the last two years of his work at the hospital as a surgeon, he did most of his online MBA, a very well-respected one.
And he was able to get a position as a physician advisor. I think it was a lot more than a physician advisor in the sense that he was doing not only helping with UM but quality improvement. And he was involved in root cause analysis. He had learned a lot about quality improvement in his role as the medical director for the cardiac program. So again, he just applied the same principles. He didn't have to do a lot of interviews. He just approached one of the hospitals they had privileges at, and he was able to move right into that position once he decided to stop working clinically, and he's still helping people provide in his hospital to provide really good patient care. So, it can be done. He has the know-how and confidence to apply to his next position if he decides to move on.
And it should be pretty obvious now that there's a series of logical steps that are best done in a deliberate way if you want to move forward from your clinical till your nonclinical. You should never just quit a job without a plan. Some people have done that successfully, but most of those have had big nest eggs that can tie them over. You really want to do small pivots. You want to do pilots. You want to do things part-time, do things on the side if you can. In the hospital setting, you can volunteer for things. And you do learn management by being the chair of a committee or two, and then working on the board, if you have an opportunity for that. So, there are ways to do it that I teach my students.
So, to reiterate, we're going to overcome the self-limiting beliefs and develop confidence in your transferable skills, which you have many of. You are going to identify some potential careers that will build on your education and training. Then you're going to become an expert at the tactics. You need to make that shift from using a mentor and networking to preparing your resume and acing your interview.
So, the other thing that's important here. And so, we're getting to the end of this part of it. And it's just to say that not wasting your time chasing useless information. This is one of the things that's a benefit of having a mentor or a coach sometimes, or a teacher or whatever you want to call that person. It's just to avoid the landmines, avoid the big mistakes that slow your progress.
And so, that is what I wanted to share with you. And especially in honor of my 200 episodes, I've kind of boiled down a lot of what I've learned in the last 30 minutes, just to give you a broad overview. And this is the path to a new fulfilling career that I want you to understand. And if you need help with that, then you should consider joining the Nonclinical Career Academy membership program. It just reopened recently. And so, if you'll indulge me for just a minute or two longer, let me tell you more about it.
So, think about what it would be like if you could find the career that you love, overcome burnout and experience joy and balance in your life and avoid another frivolous lawsuit. And feel like you're still in a career based on your medical knowledge and training. And that's why I developed the Nonclinical Career Academy so that I can help you to move in that direction quickly and conveniently.
The NCA membership program started as 12 courses back almost two years ago. Now with 22 in 7 major categories. Introductory, getting started, the important tactics. And then there are some really specific things about hospital management medical science liaison. There's a six-lesson course there that could pretty much get you fully into a position to interview and land your first job, locum tenens, and consulting.
And I set it up as a membership because then there's unlimited access to all the courses at whatever time you are available to do it. I could sell the courses individually, but I continue to add courses every couple of months or so. And a lot of that's based on the feedback I get. So, if this sounds like something that is interesting to you, then definitely to nonclinicalphysicians.com/joinnca and just look around. That's just a homepage where you can look and see there are a lot more details about it. And with the program, you can do these things. You can avoid burnout, you can move on, eliminate your lawsuits and be happy, basically, using your medical knowledge and experience.
The program does have a seven-day money-back guarantee. So, you can go in there and look around and see if it's really what you think will help you on your journey. And I've had many members who have been in it for over a year. But you can get in there and get three, four or five months under your belt, find that next career and move on. And that'll be a lot less expensive than buying a $3,000 or $4,000 or $5,000 course with this much content in it. And you only have to use the parts that you want to use and you'll have access for as long as you're a member.
The membership site closes on the 18th, Friday, the 18th of June. To learn more, just go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/joinnca. Check it out. And if it's something that you think is going to be helpful, sign up, look it over. If you don't like it, you can withdraw. Otherwise, start going through it. And let's get you on course to get your first nonclinical or non-traditional job and have you moved up to that next phase of your nonclinical professional life.
Sign up to receive email reminders, news, and free stuff every week!
Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you reminders each podcast episode, notices about nonclinical jobs, information about free and paid courses, and other curated information just for you.
Disclaimers:
Many of the links that I refer you to are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so has no effect on the price you are charged. And I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you.
The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.
The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. I do not provide medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career.
Leave A Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.