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How To Know If You Will Love Medical Writing

John Jurica — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 12:51:58 +0000

Interview with Dr. Morgan Leafe – Episode 338

In today's episode, John interviews Dr. Morgan Leafe to help you determine if you will love medical writing as much as she does.

Dr. Morgan Leafe shares her journey from clinical medicine to medical writing, emphasizing the flexibility and opportunities the field offers.

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Dr. Debra Blaine is a physician like many of you, and her greatest challenge was fear. The whole concept of leaving clinical medicine was terrifying. But she is so much happier now as a professional writer and a coach. According to Debra, “It’s like someone turned the oxygen back on.”

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Exploring the Diverse World of Medical Writing

Dr. Leafe discusses the wide spectrum of medical writing, starting with the distinctions between regulatory and non-regulatory writing. She delves into various roles, from crafting content for Continuing Medical Education (CME) activities to covering advisory boards, web content creation, journalism, and manuscript writing. Dr. Leafe provides valuable perspectives on the creative aspects, work pace, and client interactions, offering a comprehensive overview for aspiring medical writers.

Navigating the Path to a Freelance Medical Writing Career

Morgan also outlines the steps for physicians interested in entering the medical writing field. From joining professional organizations like the American Medical Writers Association to conducting informational interviews and gaining practical experience, she highlights the significance of networking and connecting with fellow medical writers.

The discussion extends to the advantages of having a medical background, efficient work practices, and the potential for recurring relationships with clients. Dr. Leafe offers insights into maintaining a freelance business, emphasizing the role of flexibility and adaptability in the dynamic field of medical writing.

Dr. Morgan Leafe's Advice

I am so enthusiastic about medical writing. Changing careers was one of the best things I've ever done in my life. And it's a great fit for folks who want to travel, part-time, full-time, freelance, employed. There's so many different options and I'm just a big advocate of getting as many physicians as we can into the field, especially because so much of the content that is generated is intended for us.

Summary

You can visit Dr. Morgan Leafe's Personal Website and for more information about Dr. Morgan Leafe and her work in medical writing, you can check her portfolio.

NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode.

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Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 338

How To Know If You Will Love Medical Writing

- Interview with Dr. Morgan Leafe

John: Medical writing is a good field to understand because it offers you a way to leverage your education background and training in a variety of genres. It's got a lot of flexibility and it's generally done remotely. And it's also one of the things you can do part-time to see if you like it. So it's really a good career or side gig for physicians and other clinicians. Today's guest is perfectly suited to tell us about that and see if she agrees with my assessment. And so, I want to welcome to this show for the first time, Dr. Morgan Leafe. Thanks for being here.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Hi, John. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.

John: Yeah. I really like talking to medical writers. Everyone has a different way of doing things. Some specialize, some do a lot of different things. I do want to pick your brain today specifically so that we can get a little bit into that. But why don't you just start by telling us a little bit about your background and how you made your way into the world of medical writing?

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Sure. Like a lot of your guests, I would say my path from clinical medicine to where I am now was not a direct route, which is not a surprise to anybody probably listening to this podcast. I did know for a while, I'm a pediatrician by training, and I did know that staying in the clinical world was not my ultimate goal in my career. And so, I started to think pretty early on in my attending career about what I wanted to do nonclinically. And actually, initially I was interested in informatics. Interested enough that I got a master's degree and became board certified and I thought my career path was taking me maybe into a leadership role within informatics.

And then one thing led to another. I was always that kind of person, probably also like a lot of your listeners who always had a side gig going on. And I ended up with a side gig where I was the pediatric medical editor for a board review company. Not even knowing that that really was in this world of medical writing that I didn't quite yet know about. And as the wheels were turning and I was saying, "I'm getting ready to leave clinical medicine, what should I do?" I found myself at the SEAK conference which you're very familiar with. And through the SEAK conference I learned specifically about the field of medical writing from Mandy Armitage, who's a fellow physician medical writer, who's been in the field for a while. And I said, "Wait, I'm kind of already doing that and I really like it, and this can be a whole career." And from there, all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place.

In 2020 I had my planned exit from clinical medicine, which ended up being very fortuitous because I actually planned to leave my job at the time in April of 2020. And my job happened to be connected to the school systems here in California. And so, when COVID hit in March of 2020, I would've been out of a job anyway.

John: Wow, great timing.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Just with all this interesting series of events. And here I am working as a full-time freelance medical writer now.

John: Okay. Have you ever been employed as a medical writer or have you always done it as a freelancer?

Dr. Morgan Leafe: I have not. For me, freelancing was my goal from the get-go. My husband works from home, he runs his own business. I also have a sister who runs her own business from home. And so, to me, that lifestyle aspect of it was very appealing. I never considered an employed role because of that.

John: I see. Now, just as a side note, you and your husband are both kind of not tied to an office. Do you ever just travel and work while you're traveling? Can you do that?

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Absolutely. All the time. I'm talking to you today from Santa Barbara, California, where we primarily live. We're originally from the East coast and we have our house in Philadelphia still where we met. And we rent that out on a short-term basis. And then for a few months out of the year, we drive cross country with our dogs and stay at our house in Philly and see our family and friends there.

John: Nice.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Everything I dreamed of when I was working those 80 hours weeks.

John: Every once in a while I talk to someone who has a remote job, but they have a remote job that they have to do from home. It's kind of a weird scenario. But if you work for an insurance company they might give you a computer and say you have to work from that site. And it's like, "Well, what's the point?"

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Yeah. Not in medical writing. You're your own boss. You're a freelancer.

John: All right. Well, let's see. We're going to get into learning a little bit here. Just from your perspective, maybe you can describe the types of medical writing. And I kind of got the feeling from reviewing your LinkedIn. You've done a lot of those, so you could either go through it as an academician or just the different things you've done. You take your pick.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Yeah. When I'm talking to folks, from the get-go, what is medical writing? I always say I like to divide it into two buckets from the top. And those buckets are regulatory writing and non-regulatory writing. The regulatory writing bucket, as you know John, is writing sort of very official paperwork, submissions for the FDA, working for pharma, for biotech. And there are certainly physicians who do that. I would say out of all the physician medical writers out there, more sway towards the non-regulatory areas. But regulatory writing is an option. Most people will tell you it's a little bit easier to get started in regulatory writing by taking an employed position because there's just so much to learn. It's a little hard to pick up on your own. And then the other bucket of the non-regulatory writing is really a very large bucket with many, many items in it.

Those of us in the non-regulatory world, one of the primary things that I do is create content for CME activities. I write a lot of blogs, I cover advisory boards. If folks are familiar with the advisory boards that take place, maybe when a new medication is coming out and all the key opinion leaders get together, usually in a nice city, and have a big meeting about it, they usually hire a medical writer to cover that event for the day and then write up a report.

Web content is a big thing for various kinds of websites. And by the way, I'll add because I think it's important to your listeners, you just never know where your experience is going to come in handy. And believe it or not, that's where informatics has really come in very handy. Even though I would not consider myself in practicing information at this point. People see my background in informatics and ask me to write about health IT issues a lot, which has been great.

There's journalism. And some people focus just on writing content for patients or light audience. And some people kind of vary between, "Oh, I write some for clinicians, I write some for patients." And of course, manuscripts are another big area of medical writing. Grants manuscripts, anything in the academic publication realm. I shy away from the manuscripts. That's a little bit of just a big long project for me. I like things that are a little bit shorter, quicker and more creative. But there's options for everyone.

John: Now, what would some typical kind of journalistic type of writing be?

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Yeah. It's interesting because journalism in the sense as it relates to medical writing can have a few different definitions, I would say. And by the way, if that's something that interests anyone who is listening, there is, I hope I don't get the acronym wrong, the American College of Healthcare Journalism - ACHJ. I think there is a professional organization for healthcare journalists. And when you think healthcare journalist, what might come to mind is Sanjay Gupta or somebody on the ground reporting on the news. And that's certainly part of it too. There's also a lot of web content to be generated in the journalism and news area.

And then the other angle too would be covering conferences. All the big meetings for the different specialties have somebody cover them for the different internal outlets for that specialty. That's actually another aspect of journalism that I don't think comes to mind for some people when they think about that area.

John: Yeah, that's interesting because I know someone who actually spent 10 years as a physician doing just that while he traveled and scuba dived and did other things. He made a living and then he went back into clinical medicine, if you can imagine that.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Wow. Those meetings are fascinating. Those big oncology meetings and all. There's so much excitement and the stories are so big. Yeah, it's a really interesting world.

John: Now, let's see. Can you give me some more comparing and contrasting? Because it was pretty obvious that the regulatory it's just, I don't know, I would call it tedious. It's very particular. A lot of rules or regs. And if you can't do it, they're not going to hire you. You got to be right on. But what are some of the differences in your mind between the other types of writing that you have done? And then I'll get into more questions once you take this first stab at it here.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Yeah. There are a lot of angles to consider when you are thinking about what type of medical writing you like. And one thing is how fast do you like to work? How fast do you like to turn around things? I like writing journalistic pieces, but to be honest, I'm so busy I don't do a lot of them because they have a quick turnaround. And right now my calendar is booked out a month. Nobody wants a new story a month from now. How much pressure you like to work under as part of it.

I think how creative you like to be in your work is a big part of it. What I love about making CME content is I'm getting the opportunity to make some really fancy slide decks and help a graphic designer make interesting graphics and really make content kind of come to life in that sense. So, if you have that sort of creative side to you, I think CME content is really appealing.

I think a lot of physicians come into medical writing with a passion for communicating with patients because that's ultimately why a lot of us became physicians. There is definitely room for that as well. It's a skill to hone and there are courses out there on that. But if you feel like my passion is really talking more to patients and helping them understand disease processes, then it is maybe teaching or informing my fellow clinicians. I think that's one thing to consider.

Who you want to work for and with is probably another consideration too. What kind of clients do you like? If you're a freelancer, do you want to freelance for a large medical communications company? I prefer smaller clients I have a personal relationship with, and that definitely plays a factor and is part of the learning curve of becoming a medical writer.

John: Yeah. When you were talking earlier, and I just want to expound on that and have you expound on that a little bit. The way I was thinking about it too is for my limited exposure, some things tend to be a little more involved. You were saying that you like the creativity of let's say the CME writing. Now I do some editing for a CME provider. And I would never write an article for them because they're a hundred pages long, they're 10 hours of CME and they have usually 100 to 200 references. And I'm like I would blow my mind.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: That's not what I do.

John: Yeah. And also tell me what you think about this in terms of how efficient can you be in certain genres and how's the pay associated with that? It kind of always boils down to an hourly rate, I guess, but what's your thinking on that?

Dr. Morgan Leafe: That's a great question, and it's funny to hear you say that about the long CME content. I'll tell you what I was working on before I came on our call today is CME activity that's on Twitter. I was writing CME activity in little 285 character bites, which I love it. It's just a totally different way to think. I think it's a lot of fun. There's so much variability out there. You're absolutely right.

And as far as efficiency and pay, to me, being a physician has a huge advantage in the field no matter what you do because of that. Because it's important to know that medical writing as a whole, I always tell people, if you went to our professional conference, the American Medical Writers Association, and you looked around the room, I don't know for sure, I'm sure the statistic exists somewhere, but I'm going to say 10% of people in there are physicians. Maybe 20, 30% are PhDs and maybe the other half bachelor's or master's in some type of science or bachelor's or master's in journalism or English.

And so, it's a very varied group of folks, which is awesome. I have just amazing colleagues that I work with. And it means that when you are coming from the medical profession where your medical knowledge is really top tier, you're going to save yourself a lot of time. People ask me a lot, "Well, do you only write on pediatric topics?" No. I write on everything.

But I can guarantee you that even as a pediatrician, when I do a project on prostate cancer, which never came across my radar as a practicing clinician, I can still read and absorb and understand the topic and the data and generate something from it a little faster than somebody who doesn't have that medical school background.

John: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And in fact, the ones that I edit, I'd say at least half of them are written by non-physicians. They're equally good but I can envision the fact that maybe the physicians are a little bit quicker at writing the CME that they're doing. The other thing that's kind of cool there, I believe, is that the way they work is that when it's time to review it, every two or three years, they're a lot more efficient because they actually get paid well, almost as much for the initial writing of it. But I'm sure it takes them a fraction of the time to review it.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Yeah. And it's a big advantage in the CME world too, because you're often asked to come up with patient cases to accompany an activity. And I think that can be a real stumbling block if you've never seen a patient before. So, it's nice just to have that, obviously, information that you don't even think of as an advantage necessarily, but that's in your head, you know what it is to see a patient, what they're going to say, what they're going to ask. So, that comes into play probably more than you even think about as a medical writer.

John: I'd never thought of that. It never even crossed my mind. That is a very good point. Okay. Now I know that you do some mentoring, coaching, advising and so forth. I'm going to kind of flip it around and say, okay, let's say that someone has a penitent for writing of some sort. Is there a way that you can help them figure out other than just doing all of it for a while, which is going to be very inefficient, how to pursue this. You already mentioned some of the characteristics, but maybe there's a way we can approach it logically from the beginning.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Absolutely. If you're interested in medical writing and you are saying, "This seems really interesting to me. I don't know what field, how do I go forward?" I think a couple of things. First step is definitely do your research. Go to the American Medical Writers Association, consider joining. It's only like $250 a year, and it's really an amazing professional organization. I can't say enough good about it. It's very, very supportive people. And there are a lot of racist sources on there about the different areas where you can learn more. You can also join your local chapter and connect with people there to learn more.

And then there's a wonderful book written by Dr. Mandy Armitage about going from clinical medicine to medical writing. That's a great resource. You already know Dr. Emma Hitt Nichols has a course that teaches you backgrounds in journalism, CME, manuscripts and other things you might want to know.

Just by starting out and trying to hone your skills, I think that's a good first step. That might make you say, "Oh, okay. Yeah, I didn't really like writing that whole manuscript. That was too much for me. Or the CME, I had to look up all those references. That wasn't for me." That's a good place to start.

I always want to caution people that you don't need to go overboard with training or investigating things. There absolutely are certificate programs out there for medical writing. University of San Diego has one. University of Chicago has one. If you really want to pursue that, go for it. But don't do it because you feel like it's a requirement under the profession, because it is not. Most of us don't do such multi-year programs to get into the profession. So, it's not a bad thing, but it's not a necessity. And then I think you get out there, you try it out, you see what you like. And the fact of the matter is what happened for me and how I continue down the path of CME writing is that was the work that was coming to me.

A lot of the work that you're going to get in medical writing comes from networking. You meet, you network, you introduce to people and they offer you work. And sometimes that pushes you along your path as well. Really networking and talking to people, especially about what they do is a great way to learn if that's the field for you. "Oh, you do advisor role. How much do you have to travel for that? How much notice do they give you? What's the pay like?"

And most medical writers are super happy to talk with you on any specific topic. They're very sharing groups. So, anything that you can ask questions about, do. And it's a process and you can change. It's not like going into residency where you're stuck. You can change your mind.

John: Excellent. Now let's see, one thing I was going to ask you. Are most of the projects that you're doing now from recurring relationships with a given company or firm or whatever it might be?

Dr. Morgan Leafe: They are, yes, which is really exciting. And that was a big part of the growing process for me over the past four years or so, expanding my business, because of course, when you start out right, you're like, "I'll take any client that will pay me anything." And then you reach the point, "Okay, I have this many clients and maybe I'm even getting more work than I can handle."

And then for me, I came to just a really lovely position of being able to choose who I wanted to work with and work with people who really reflected my values and who I have a lot of fun working with. I have just the nicest clients. I can't say enough about all of my current clients and how wonderful they are. And that is really a breath of fresh air, I think, especially for maybe the burned out physician out there who's just having a tough time in your office environment. It's a real change of pace because I think everybody in medical writing is very cognizant of the fact that lives are not hinging on what we do. And it just is a lot more relaxed and it's really laid back. So, recurring clients and maintaining those relationships is key.

John: Yeah. And you'll probably... Well, I'm not going to say "probably". You'll never be sued as a medical writer.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: I hope not. I have insurance in case I do.

John: Just in case. Okay. But yeah, it's very cheap compared to medical malpractice.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Yeah. Well, I'll tell you something, John. My errors in omissions insurance actually costs more money per year than my malpractice did my last year in practice.

John: Really? Are you high-risk pediatrics or what?

Dr. Morgan Leafe: I was only practicing part-time, so that affected the malpractice insurance. But you know what happens when you get into these nonclinical roles that aren't well understood by the general public is the insurance company just hears that you're a doctor and that's all they can hear.

John: It's inflated.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: It's one of those things you learn along the way about running a business. You just figure it out.

John: Yeah. There are always some expenses in that, of course. The other thing, just to give us an idea, about how many regular relationships for recurring work do you have at any given time?

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Okay. I'm a little ambitious. I would say I'm working usually for a project at some stage or another, maybe for 10 different clients at a time. That's going to totally vary depending on the type of work that you do though, and how many hours and what types of projects. CME projects tend to span a number of months to put together. It's a little more feasible to be working on multiple of them at once because they're all at different stages. It just totally depends.

Some people will, and I don't recommend this to tell you the truth. Some people will take on a freelance client that's giving them 30 hours a week of work. Then that person is kind of giving you 75% of your work hours. And that's fine. Again, it's a good way to get started, but I feel more comfortable having multiple streams of income in case one of them goes away. To me, that's really the comfort in freelancing as opposed to employed work. I'm not sure everybody's answer would be the same, but I would say for me give or take 10 clients at a time.

John: And I have to assume you have some kind of master calendar where you can figure out, "Well, this is a three month project, this is a six month or two month, and so let's fit it here." Like you said, these things are scheduled in advance, not like I need an article on this next weekend.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Flexibility is key as a medical writer, especially in the CME realm, because ultimately all the content I am creating is usually going to a key opinion leader in the field to review and to maybe present as a webinar. Those people are very busy. And so, delays happen all the time. And I'm going to show you since we're on video, but the listeners won't be able to see. I'm showing you right now my paper calendar that I fill in with a pencil because things change. And that was a technique my business coach taught me. That has been very useful. You have to be able to roll with the punches. If it's going to throw you for a loop, that somebody says, "Oh, this is delayed a week", then you want to consider that when you are specializing within the medical writing realm.

John: Very good. Now that helps a lot. I'm going to go back to something you talked about at the very beginning of the types of work that you do, because to me, I couldn't figure out how you would find those jobs. And you were talking about working for advisory boards.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Yes.

John: And that seems like something that wouldn't have an easy way to find, but is there a way?

Dr. Morgan Leafe: It doesn't because it's kind of a popular thing to do. You get in there and you get to know people. It's a networking thing. The way that people are recruited for advisory boards is often through medical communication companies. I have been contacted before because some of these advisory boards are filmed or audio recorded, I have been contacted by the companies that are doing the recording. They've been asked to hire a medical writer. So, it just kind of depends, but yeah, it's not the easiest one to chase after. It's a little more falling into it and making connections over time. Because it becomes one of those relationships with your fellow medical writers kind of thing. "Oh, I got caught about this. I can't do it. It's a date I already have something else. Are you able to go?"

Interestingly, advisory boards all used to be travel. Then, of course, during COVID they went to Zoom. It's not a huge piece of what I do right now, but I know people who do many. And what I'm told is, it's kind of split now. Some are still on Zoom, but some people are back to traveling. Depending on how you feel about travel, that's going to influence whether covering advisory boards are interesting to you or not.

John: Okay. Good to know. Well, let's see. We're going to run out of time here soon. Any other tactics or things we should know about if we're thinking about getting into this field?

Dr. Morgan Leafe: This is similar to a lot of nonclinical fields. I know I've said this already in the podcast, but really networking and putting yourself out there to meet people is really the key. I have a lot of people who come to me and say, "Oh, I found all these medical writing jobs on LinkedIn and I applied and I never get a response." And I'm like, "Yeah, you're not going to. That's just not the way to get a job in medical writing."

And as you know, networking can sound like a very intimidating term. I don't mean it in the sense of schmooze people. Very direct people reach out to me on LinkedIn like, "Do you have any work for me?" No. That's not the way to do it. But the way to do it is to reach out to other physician medical writers, "Hey, do you have 15 minutes? I can pick your brain about your career or sort of an informational interview type of situation." And just getting involved, getting to meet people. You never know where a connection is going to lead.

I'll tell you that a few of my first clients, how I got them was I was on a Facebook group for women physicians. And this was during COVID and I had just embarked on my full-time medical writing career. And a woman posted in the group about being a medical director for a CME company. And their conference was being canceled, and what do people think? And I said, "Oh, you're a medical director for a CME company. I've been writing needs assessments for CME, but I don't really know what a medical director is. Could I talk to you about that?" And we talked on the phone and it turns out we went to the same medical school. She's like 20 years older than me, but we went to the same school and she's lovely. And I now call her my godmother of medical writing and she connected me with now three of my current clients.

So, you just don't know. You can't expect something from every conversation that you have with somebody because it's not going to be the case, but you can expect to make friendly contacts and something is going to lead somewhere. So, it really is just that putting yourself out there is going to be more productive for moving your career forward than clicking that apply button on LinkedIn.

John: Yeah. But LinkedIn is another place to do research, and my recommendation is that they go to, for example, your LinkedIn profile and other medical writers' profiles because they will see the names of a bunch of companies that they could possibly talk to.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm the first person to say, and I didn't mention this, besides being a medical writer, I'm also a resume writer and LinkedIn profile writer. But I'm always open to say to people, if you're not sure what to put in your LinkedIn profile, go to mine. Check it out. You can borrow it, please don't copy it exactly. But if you need an idea of what to put in a LinkedIn profile to get noticed as a medical writer, yeah, please look me up. Absolutely. And importantly, AMWA, the American Medical Writers Association also has a freelance directory that is a similar, tiny version of LinkedIn. And if you join and get the freelance membership, you can have a listing in there. I get tons of clients from there.

John: Nice.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: That's another good place to get your information out there because yeah, networking is key, but people are also going to find you as long as you put the right information out there.

John: And I'm thinking if the listeners are interested in medical writing and they might want to actually talk to you directly. So, why don't you tell us where we can find you? Of course, we know LinkedIn and actually I think it's just your name so they can look that up and find you pretty easily.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: And my last name is Leafe. My website is morganleafemd.com and you can reach me by email morgan@morganleafemd.com. And if you're interested in what medical writing portfolio looks like for collecting your samples or what types of pieces you might be interested or wanting to write and how to put together a portfolio for yourself, you can check my portfolio out, which is turnoveranewleafe.com.

John: Excellent. Yeah, I looked at both of those and it was pretty nice the way you've got it broken down on the portfolio page. It's a lot more detailed than looking at your LinkedIn profile, but looks very nice.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Thank you.

John: Let's see. I think that's all that we need today. A lot of information there. I will put links to everything that we talked about in terms of some of those resources at the beginning and AMWA and anything I can capture. And so, that'll make it easy for listeners and viewers if they're looking at the YouTube version of this. Any other last bits of advice for our listeners before I let you go?

Dr. Morgan Leafe: I would just say I am so enthusiastic about medical writing. Changing careers was one of the best things I've ever done in my life. And it's a great fit for folks who want to travel, part-time, full-time, freelance, employed. There's so many different options and I'm just a big advocate of getting as many physicians as we can into the field, especially because so much of the content that is generated is intended for us. I hope that some folks who are listening today are inspired to check out medical writing because it's a lot of fun.

John: Yes. I think you've been very inspirational. I like your story and your enthusiasm. It's been fantastic. Thanks Morgan for being here. With that, I'll say goodbye.

Dr. Morgan Leafe: Thanks John.

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The post How To Know If You Will Love Medical Writing appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

Revisiting How to Land An Awesome Job Using LinkedIn – 310

John Jurica — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 12:00:06 +0000

Interview with Dr. Heather Fork

Today's presentation is a replay of Dr. Heather Fork's presentation in which she explains how to land an awesome job using LinkedIn.

Heather is an ICF master-certified coach. She helps physicians find their best career path forward, whether in medicine, a nonclinical career, or something else. In 2010 Heather founded the Doctor’s Crossing. Since that time, she has helped hundreds of physicians find greater career fulfillment and meaning in their work.

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.

New Podcast

Dr. Fork hosts the weekly Doctor’s Crossing Carpe Diem Podcast. And she is passionate about creating new resources to make it easier for physicians to navigate their careers.

She previously described her Resumé Writing Kit here on the PNC Podcast.

How to Land An Awesome Job Using LinkedIn

Heather begins our discussion by explaining what LinkedIn is, and why it is unique among social media sites. She notes that when she started coaching, LinkedIn was not an essential tool for physicians seeking a new career.

The biggest mistake physicians make is not getting “in the parade” and having fun. – Dr. Heather Fork

Today, she says that 100% of her clients use LinkedIn as an integral part of their career search strategy. That's why she found it so important to help her clients and other physicians by creating a LinkedIn course for them.

Summary

Dr. Heather Fork explains why LinkedIn is important, and how to land a nonclinical job by using it in new ways. She also explained its most critical functions and points out little-known tips, including her “Alumni Hack.”

IMPORTANT REMINDER: Heather has created her own “how-to” course called LinkedIn for Physicians that anybody can purchase if they need help setting up their profile properly. This is, by far, the best resource for quickly learning how to set up your LinkedIn page and use it to network, attract recruiters, and find a nontraditional job. [Note: this link is an affiliate link so I receive a stipend for promoting it that does NOT affect the price of the course to you.- JJ]

NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode.

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Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 310

How to Land An Awesome Job Using LinkedIn

John: I'm very pleased to bring today's guest back to the podcast for the third time. She's been an awesome source of support for physicians struggling with their careers for many years and she's a very well-known ICF Master Certified Coach in resume and LinkedIn expert. Hello, Dr. Heather Fork.

Dr. Heather Fork: Hello, iconic Dr. John Jurica. Thank you so much for that very generous intro. And I have to say, I am a huge fan of yours. Yours is probably the first podcast I ever listened to.

John: Well, I'm happy to hear that and I'm glad to hear it. And it's mutual because I love your podcast. Oops. I shouldn't have spilled the beans that you have a podcast. That's one of the new things you're doing. But I love your podcast, I love your coaching, and your blog too has much good stuff on it. We're not going to go over all your past history because they can go back and listen to the previous episodes if they like. What I really want to know is since it's been about a year and a half, what new things have you been up to?

Dr. Heather Fork: Well, spoiler. A podcast.

John: There you go.

Dr. Heather Fork: Now, you inspired me with this medium that I've been putting off. And when I heard you and then Amy Porterfield, I thought this is so valuable. Especially since I don't really like to write and I've been blogging for 10 years, I just had to do something different.

The podcast started last October. And as you know, it's a lot of work to do a weekly podcast, but it's much fun and I love getting my former clients to come on and other guests because they're so fantastic. And what I hear from listeners is I don't feel alone anymore. Someone else feels the way I do. I don't feel like I'm damaged goods and I have hope.

John: Yeah. Well, it's been a while since I started, but one of the things I realized shortly after I started and I heard from people is that you are part of people's life. They know your voice. I was at a meeting once and someone came up to me and said, "Hey, I recognize you. Aren't you John Jurica?" We were at a meeting about nonclinical careers. But just that whole idea that you're talking to them directly.

Dr. Heather Fork: Yes, it's intimate. And I love it because you can really help people feel too what you're expressing and what the guests are expressing. I think it really changes the landscape from being something to just thinking about making changes, to feeling like it's really possible. That these people are really alive. Someone just didn't write a bunch of stuff and put it on a paper and made it up.

John: That's true. Now, oddly enough, there are some people that have never listened to a single podcast. I don't know how we get to them. But for those who are listening and want to learn about nonclinical careers or burnout or nontraditional careers or just, I don't know, feeling better about your life, definitely, you want to listen to Doctor's Crossing Carpe Diem podcast. Why did you pick that name?

Dr. Heather Fork: I just love the term "carpe diem". And my coaching program is called Carpe Diem because like Robin William said in that movie, "Dead Poets Society" that, "Before long we're going to be pushing up daisy's unless we carpe that diem." And we got on this path and our whole life has been planned out for us. And if we don't really question, is it what we really want to be doing? Is it making us happy? We'll be pushing up daisy's and saying, "Oh my God, I didn't get to have the life I wanted."

John: For sure. Yeah. Seize the day, right?

Dr. Heather Fork: Yes.

John: All right. Everyone's going to go listen to your podcast, but that is not really the main reason I wanted you to come on today because we discussed something a few years ago about creating different resources for people that we could share with our followers and our listeners and all that.

And then I saw that you, the expert in LinkedIn, recently created a course. But I'm going to just talk to you about LinkedIn. That's what we're going to spend the next 20 minutes doing, because I don't think that our listeners always understand the importance or why we should learn about it if we're not already using it. Just explain what LinkedIn is for those that have never used it, or have just dabbled a little bit and maybe why it's different from other social media sites.

Dr. Heather Fork: I'd love to. LinkedIn is considered the number one networking platform for professionals, and it has over 800 million members. So, it's worldwide. And I'd say the main thing about it, that's different from Facebook and Instagram and these other platforms is that it's really for those of you who want to have a professional platform, you can have your own profile, who want to network with other professionals with a really powerful search engine. I call it the Rolodex on Steroids. And also, be able to use your profile to apply for jobs and interact with recruiters. It's one-stop shopping and a platform that's continuing to evolve.

John: Well, I'm on LinkedIn fairly often. It's actually one way that I find podcast guests, for example. And being an introvert, I'm not a big networker per se, but it's an awesome way to network as is a podcast, of course.

But the thing is, I have never seen a nasty conversation on LinkedIn. People are like, they don't want to go to Twitter and Facebook because it's just loaded with sometimes some nasty stuff. And LinkedIn is, like you said, it's professional. It's a place where you can find jobs and post jobs, if you like. Does it come into play a lot in terms of the people you work with, that you coach or that you're teaching? I know you've done some speaking about LinkedIn. Does it seem to help them? And how often does it become a critical part of their career search?

Dr. Heather Fork: That's a great question, John. And I would say back in 2010 when I first started, LinkedIn was there, but it wasn't used as much. But now all of my clients use LinkedIn. And let me explain how it's helpful by painting a little scenario. Let's say we have two physicians and they're both applying for the same nonclinical job. One is on LinkedIn, one isn't. The one who isn't on LinkedIn applies through the regular channel, say maybe Indeed with their CV or resume. Then the other physician applies on LinkedIn. And the difference is when the recruiter gets a CV for that first physician, they just have the CV or resume. They don't see a picture. They don't see recommendations. They don't have this dynamic visual of the physician.

Then if they go to the physician who applied through LinkedIn or even has a link for their LinkedIn profile on their resume, that recruiter can click and then they already see this beautiful face. They see a lovely banner photo and then everything's right there that they need that would've been on the resume. Plus, there are a lot of additional things you can put on your LinkedIn profile. They might read a recommendation that describes exactly who they're looking for. That's not going to be on your resume.

John: Absolutely. Yeah. In my mind, I think about a Venn diagram, things overlap and a resume and LinkedIn overlap a lot, and then networking overlaps with your LinkedIn. And you're right. The LinkedIn profile is just so much more complete. Not that you want to send in a five-page resume. But if someone wants to look for that information, it's right there on LinkedIn.

Dr. Heather Fork: Exactly. So, the physician who's using LinkedIn, when they want to apply for a certain job, they could find a physician who's working in that company, and they can reach out to them for an informational interview. And then often those physicians get a finder's fee if they refer somebody who gets hired. So, there's an incentive for them to talk to you. If that person's applying and they were recommended by another physician, the recruiter already likes them because there's a much higher success rate for candidates found that way. It makes it easier. So, you can see how very quickly that physician who's on LinkedIn already has many advantages.

John: I had a podcast guest tell me once that submitting a CV on a website is the way of madness. She had literally said she had submitted a thousand resumes and had never received a response. And she noted that once she figured out that she just needed to have some connection with somebody, either find out who the hiring manager was or have somebody that she knows in the company, some touchpoint, then she had some actual jobs that were requesting she come and interview.

Dr. Heather Fork: Oh my gosh, that's such a discouraging story to send out thousands and not hear anything back. I'm surprised she persisted that long.

John: Well, I think it's misleading because it's just so easy. Oh, I'm just going to cut and paste and cut and paste and cut and paste. But no one's looking at those kinds of resumes, I don't think. My daughter is a recruiter for a big firm and they use LinkedIn constantly.

Dr. Heather Fork: Well, it's really becoming the go-to platform for recruiters. And when you apply for a job on LinkedIn, often, you'll actually see the recruiter that's connected to that position and you can reach out to them. You can attach your resume right there in addition to the formal application process. You can start a relationship. You could also just look at jobs you're interested in and you may not be ready to apply, but you can connect with that recruiter and say, "Hey, I'm not ready yet, but I'd love to establish a relationship with you."

John: Yeah, absolutely. That's so true. You mentioned how all of your clients use LinkedIn. Can you give us some examples of where it was very critical to a particular, without naming names, particular clients?

Dr. Heather Fork: Sure. Absolutely. I have some great stories. I had one client who wanted to transition into a certain nonclinical area. And we were on the phone together and we were both searching on LinkedIn. And because she wasn't having a lot of success at first, connecting with a couple of folks on LinkedIn. So, I said, "Here, let's find somebody." I found this person with her same specialty, and she sent him a message. She heard from him the next day. They had a chat. It turns out they knew a couple of people in common who were working at that company as well. She ended up getting an interview and it took a while because they didn't quite have an opening then for her specialty, but she got the job and she's working in the job and she's really happy.

John: Very nice.

Dr. Heather Fork: I have another story. This was a physician who was brand new to LinkedIn. When she came to me, she didn't have a profile or anything. She created it. It really doesn't take that long when you just follow the steps. And I taught her my alumni hack, which is one of my favorite little things to do on LinkedIn that's very powerful, is to search your alumni network. That could be people you went to college with, med school, even your training program, and see if they're working in the industry or at the company that you're interested in.

She found someone who went to her small liberal arts college who was working in the company where she wanted to work. She messaged him, he got back to her right away, and said, "Send me a resume. I want to give it to the hiring manager." She did that. The hiring manager reaches out, interviews within a week. Does another interview, gets the job. There was one and done. One application, a couple of interviews, got the job.

John: It's amazing. I think sometimes we feel like if we're reaching out to someone, we haven't seen in 20 years, they're not going to respond. But the reality is when I'm on the receiving end, if I get a note of any sort, whether it's an email or LinkedIn and they're from my Alma mater. I mean, invariably, I respond immediately. That's just human nature, I think.

Dr. Heather Fork: You are family, and those little connections are huge. It's funny how we're like that. The first time we had gone to the school, like I said, 20 years ago or before you, or after you, but you are buddies.

John: Yeah. Even if it's someone from two or three years, if you're at the same school, you just have that bond and can talk about the different things and you feel like you're somehow you owe that person for some reason in a good way.

Dr. Heather Fork: Yeah. You just feel this common connection. That really it feels like a blood brother or something.

John: Now, I hear another thing people tell me about LinkedIn is they create a profile and they should put certain keywords if they're looking to be found by someone. Is that a big thing? Is that a minor thing to consider?

Dr. Heather Fork: That's a great question, John. Now, there's something on LinkedIn called "Your headline". And this is what comes below your name, or you have your degrees and everything. And by default, LinkedIn puts in the company where you're working and your job title. That's just by default. But you can customize this headline with keywords that will help recruiters find you or the people you want to find you. For example, it might just say that you're a physician at Slippery Rock Clinic, or something like that. But you can put in, medical writer, consultant, physician advisor, you can put in expert witness, the side gigs that you might be doing. Even you can say, "Seeking position in drug safety".

John: Wow. Nice. That helps really to key off those who are actually looking on LinkedIn for someone to contact like a recruiter or something like that.

Dr. Heather Fork: You can do that. And then those keywords also are important to have in your "About section", which is like your customized bio. They can also go in your "Experience section". They can go anywhere on your profile and they are searchable.

John: That really helps. I'm telling you. Let me turn it around now. Here's the way I like to look at things sometimes is like, let's look at the other side of the coin. What are the mistakes? Now, we've kind of alluded to them in a way by what a good way to use LinkedIn is. But have you seen working with people and said, "Wait a second, this is why people aren't looking at your profile?" Any common mistakes that we make when we first start to use LinkedIn?

Dr. Heather Fork: I would say there definitely are mistakes like that, of not optimizing the profile. And there are lots of ways to do that. But some of the biggest mistakes are really just not getting in the parade and then shutting the parade down too soon. What do I mean by that? Not getting in the parade is saying, well, I'm a private person. I really don't like to put myself out there, or I'm really introverted. I don't like to network. Or you get on LinkedIn, you put up a basic profile. Maybe you send a few messages, apply for a few jobs, nothing happens. And you just say, well, this doesn't work and I don't have time. Which I completely understand. It is not the most intuitive platform. And these things that I teach in the course help you know how to use it and use it strategically so it's not wasting your time.

John: Okay. Now you mentioned the course. I mentioned it earlier and I do want to learn more about the course. I do want to remind my listeners though, of course of your website, doctorscrossing.com. That's where pretty much they can find everything. Now I understand also, you have a page there that has a bunch of free resources. That looked pretty awesome. Can you tell us about that first?

Dr. Heather Fork: Absolutely. On my website, under the freebie tab, there are these downloadable PDFs that you can have. One is a starter kit that's very extensive on how you can go from being overwhelmed at the crossroad to figuring out how to move forward. That has a lot of great information for your career process. Then there's one on medical writing. There's one on pharma. There's a chart review. There might be some others there. I can't quite remember, but you can go to the freebie tab and take whatever you want.

John: I went and looked today. I think there were at least six that were there and they address different things. I've downloaded several of them, of course, but I would recommend people to go. And you can go directly there at doctorscrossing.com/freeresources, or just go to the website and look for it.

Okay. Now you have a LinkedIn course. This is something that I have been looking forward to for a long time. One of those things that I thought we really needed. I have this little video that I made five years ago where I built a LinkedIn profile. It is so dated. It is so ugly. And then I just said, "I'm not going to do anything, because I'm waiting for Heather to come out with her course." So, it's called what? LinkedIn course for physicians?

Dr. Heather Fork: You always do quality work and you're also incredibly prolific. You put about a hundred things to my one.

John: Okay. I'm not going to argue with you except that this course is beautiful. I will say that it's a lot prettier than anything I've produced. It's just awesome. Tell us about how it's structured and what does it go through?

Dr. Heather Fork: Thanks for asking. And I have to say, this has been the hardest thing I've done in my business. It took me a year. It wouldn't take me that long if I was doing the second one, but the course is three hours of video that's broken down into 22 short lessons, five minutes to 10 minutes. And what it does is it walks you through creating your profile, then teaches you how to start networking and message people. There are specific examples and templates to use of, "Well, what do you say in that message when you only have 300 characters? What do you do when someone doesn't respond to that message, and then how do you write longer messages"? We cover networking and then we go on to "How to start searching for jobs?" Because that's another thing that really gets people in a twist is, "I see all these job descriptions and they want five to seven years and I'm not qualified" and that's another area of difficulty. I really talk about that.

And then I also show them how to apply for jobs and work with recruiters. And there's all these little things you don't really know about. For example, did you know, John, that you can put yourself in anonymous mode when you want to go look at people's profile, but you don't want them to see that you've been visiting them and then you can turn it back on and be visible?

John: No, no, I've never tried that, but it would be definitely a useful tool.

Dr. Heather Fork: It really is. You can stalk a bit on LinkedIn.

John: One of the things that I did find out though is if you have a profile and you want to make a change to it and you don't want your boss to be notified of the change, you can go in and turn that off temporarily or permanently where they won't be notified of new changes. You can be a little under the radar that way.

Dr. Heather Fork: Yes, that's 100% correct. You can stop those notifications to your contacts. A couple of other things about the course is that I really wanted to make it easy to use. With each lesson, there's a downloadable cheat sheet that goes over all the steps, and in the videos, I'll teach about how to do something. For example, how to write your "About section". And then I'll go on LinkedIn in the video and show them exactly how to do it, where to click, where to go, and then show examples of other physicians about sections.

My goal was to take the frustration out, make it doable. And I love people now responding to me saying, "Oh, the course was really easy to use. I'm really happy with my profile now," and they'll send me their profile. And it's so fun to see how great they look.

John: It's good to have someone who really understands how something like this is used telling you and teaching you about it because I've been using LinkedIn for a long time. And I was just in your course a couple of days ago and there was a whole section. I was like, "Oh, I could probably really get my connections up quite a bit using this technique that you described". Which is again, reaching out to alumni or other ways of networking. And then, there's different ways that you can connect. There are some with a message, without a message. And I just really was really impressed and I'm definitely going to go back and go through that section. Especially when I'm looking for a new podcast guest.

Dr. Heather Fork: Well, thank you. And that was my goal to just make it easy because we don't have extra time to waste and I don't want people to get frustrated and then give up.

John: No, absolutely. And it can be frustrating until you really get a feel for it. Well, there are different ways that they can access this course. They can get it from your website, but I happen to be an affiliate. I have a link for it. And the only reason the listeners might want to buy it through my link is that they also get a free bundle of courses from my nonclinical career academy worth a couple of hundred dollars.

I'll put my link for them to look at, nonclinicalphysicians.com/linkedincourse. And I'll probably put that actually on my website at some point permanently if you'll let me, but that's an easy way to go. If they happen to be at your website, they're going to obviously sign up there. You've got some other resources there as well. So, anything else you want to tell us about the LinkedIn course before we move on off that topic?

Dr. Heather Fork: Before I say anything else about the course, I do want to say, please get it from John because he's so wonderful. He works so hard and I'd really like to support him. Please feel free to use his link. And if you come to my site, and you forgot his, just email me and I'll send it to you. I want you to support him, but thank you for all you do for me.

About the course and LinkedIn in general, I would just like to say that if you feel that this is not what you're naturally good at, networking or putting yourself out there, just let go of that. Because a lot of my clients are introverted. They had the same feelings about LinkedIn. They would drop their shoulders and just feel like, "Ugh, do I really have to, Heather?"

But once they get on there and do things such as usually the alumni hack and they get someone to respond to them, they're really happy. It's a game-changer. And all of a sudden, they see that being on LinkedIn is like treasure hunting. We don't have to call it networking. Let's just call it treasure hunting because you do find these treasures of people who will definitely help you out and open doors.

John: Yeah, that's so true. That's so true. Maybe I'll make you step back even further, just in considering all the clients that you've known over the years and the people you're helping now, any other advice you have for physicians who just right now happen to be just kind of frustrated with the whole process of thinking about doing a side gig or trying to overcome burnout or anything like that?

Dr. Heather Fork: Yes. Yes. And if I can go back to my parade metaphor.

John: Sure.

Dr. Heather Fork: I would say, just get in the parade. Don't sit on the sidelines and watch other people's floats go by and say, "Oh, well, look what they're doing. Why can't that be me? They probably just knew somebody or that's not going to happen to me." I say, get in the parade, start building your float. And when you're building your float for the parade, you start with your platform. And you don't have to know where the parade is going. Just start with your profile or just start thinking about what you want to do, what's working, what's not working. Build your platform.

And then when you're actually on your float and riding in the parade, have fun. Don't look around at other people's floats and say, "Oh, theirs is better than mine. I'll never be like them." Cheer them on, dance on your platform, and have fun because it's not about getting to the end of the parade, we're all going to get there, but we want to be enjoying the parade while it's happening, which it's your life. I'm there standing on the sidelines cheering you on. Get in there so I can wave my pom-poms for you.

John: That is so cool, Heather. It is. And listeners can get a sense if they haven't read your blog or listened to your podcast, they're going to get more of what you just heard. That's a good thing. Let's go over that again.

The podcast is the Doctor's Crossing Carpe Diem podcast. They're going to find that on any app, Spotify, Apple, whatever. Definitely listen to that, go to doctorscrossing.com, and look for those free resources. And if you want to learn more about the course, go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/linkedincourse, and you'll have a page there where you can learn more about it. I think we've covered everything I wanted to cover today, Heather. This has been fantastic and fun. I'm always happy to be able to spend a few minutes talking to you.

Dr. Heather Fork: It's such an honor, John. I'm a huge fan of yours. And can I put a plugin for your new script app that you have?

John: Yes.

Dr. Heather Fork: I love all the things John does. If you haven't heard about his new script app is a community where you can join very, very affordably and get a lot of wonderful content, access to his courses, access to mentors. John, you can let people know the price and how they find it. But I think it's something to really look into.

John: Yeah. The nice thing about it too is it's not limited to physicians. And so, most of us work in teams, whether clinically or nonclinically. It's actually designed for any healthcare licensed professionals, psychologists, social workers, PAs, MPs, oral surgeons, and doctors. It's like less than $5 a month. It's newscript.app. I appreciate you bringing that up today, Heather.

Dr. Heather Fork: Yeah. How can you not? $5 Starbucks, miss that for one day, get the new script app and you'll be doing a jig.

John: Absolutely. All right, Heather. Well, thank you much. I guess we're at the end of our time now, I'm going to say goodbye and I hope to see you again soon and back on the podcast sometime.

Dr. Heather Fork: Thank you, John. I really appreciate you having me on.

John: You're welcome. Bye-bye.

Dr. Heather Fork: Bye-bye.

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The post Revisiting How to Land An Awesome Job Using LinkedIn – 310 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

Top Tips to Find Your First Nonclinical Job Using LinkedIn – 303

John Jurica — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 12:30:07 +0000

A Great Tool to Find Your First Nonclinical Job

In today's episode, John briefly describes how advanced features in LinkedIn can help you find your first nonclinical job.

We delve into the advanced functionalities of LinkedIn, exploring how it enables users to expand their professional connections, customize profile visibility, and access job opportunities.

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.

Power of LinkedIn: Find Your First Nonclinical Job

LinkedIn is not your ordinary social media site; it serves as an online profile or resumé where users can showcase their experiences, education, and interests to the public. While many physicians have a basic profile, there are numerous untapped features that can enhance networking and job search capabilities.

John explored leveraging these features to uncover non-traditional or nonclinical job opportunities. Additionally, John will provide you with a powerful tool specifically designed to assist physicians in harnessing the full potential of LinkedIn for their nonclinical job search.

Unleashing the Power of LinkedIn: Four Key Topics

Let's delve into the four key topics that will transform your LinkedIn experience and help you find your first nonclinical job:

Connecting:
In this topic, John mentions Degrees of Connections which categorizes connections into primary, secondary, and tertiary degrees and utilizes LinkedIn Search. This includes the mentors, coaches, and sponsors who play a significant role in professional growth, utilize the “alumni hack” strategy, and take advantage of premium LinkedIn features.
Networking:
The goal is to establish relationships where they can provide referrals or information related to job opportunities or career paths. John will introduce you to how to provide value and recognize the importance of reciprocity with mentors and coaches.
Job Searching:
John provided 2 steps under this topic namely, Connecting with the Hiring Teams and Leveraging LinkedIn Features.
Engaging with Recruiters:
Gain insights into establishing meaningful connections with recruiters and maximizing your chances of getting noticed.

Summary

LinkedIn is known for its user-friendly interface that prompts users to complete their profiles and provides reminders to fill in any missing basic sections. LinkedIn provides reminders and encouragement to ensure that you don't overlook any basic sections while creating your profile.

The “LinkedIn for Physicians” course provides a comprehensive approach to setting up a LinkedIn profile, utilizing its features, connecting with others, finding companies and jobs, and setting up your profile in a way that doesn't interfere with your current job. The course is constantly updated and can be accessed through the website nonclinicalphysicians.com/linkedincourse. The course is very reasonably priced for the valuable information and guidance it provides in leveraging LinkedIn effectively and quickly!

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Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 303

Top Tips to Find Your First Nonclinical Job Using LinkedIn

John: All right. Now let's get into today's topic. I will start by giving you somewhat of a definition and answering the question "What is LinkedIn?" Technically LinkedIn is a social media site, but it's a fairly unique social media site. Anybody that's used it would know this. There aren't a lot of competitors for LinkedIn. I will mention another site that's very similar to it in doing some of the functions that LinkedIn delivers to us. I'll talk about that later.

But basically, I look at LinkedIn primarily as an online profile, an online resume, if you will, that allows us to go in, create a profile that's accessible to the public. Although to varying degrees, depending on who's trying to look at it, it allows you to post your experiences, your education, your volunteer activities. You can post a personal statement about what you do and what your interests are, and there's a lot to it.

You can post things on there on a regular basis. And so, that's what most people see it as. And I think most physicians have at least a basic profile, a basic page put together. And I've talked before about how to put that page together and what should be on it. And the reason I wanted to do this update today is because I wanted to focus on some of the other features of LinkedIn that enhance its ability to enable us to network and to find jobs.

That's the other piece of LinkedIn. The profile is an integral part of that, and you can set the features to allow you to let some people see the profile and other people not, you can send your profile to people. In that sense, it's definitely very useful for helping on your job search.

But there's some more advanced features, I guess I'd call them, that many of us have not used to a large extent. Many of us have just put our profile out there, let people be aware of what we're doing, what our interests are, maybe message other members and look at their profiles. But there's some features I want to talk about today.

Now some of this I've talked about in the past, like I said, some of the basics about LinkedIn. So I'll put links in today's episode show notes to take you to those posts so that if you want to go back and review them, you can.

The so-called advanced features, which are pretty integral to it, and many of you maybe have already started using, include the ability to connect with others on LinkedIn to grow your network, to search for jobs and to engage with recruiters. That's where a lot of the really useful and effective techniques fall when you're trying to pursue a non-traditional or a nonclinical job. Sure, you can put your profile out there, but can you use LinkedIn to actually find jobs, find companies, find recruiters at those companies and so forth.

And while I'm not going to get into the specifics of this, I want to just explain how you can use it, and particularly for those of you that haven't used it to do this in the past, and maybe give you some insights, encourage you to start using it for those purposes. And I'll provide some instruction for that. And then I will give you a resource that is probably, as in my opinion, the best resource for clinicians, particularly physicians who want to learn how to use LinkedIn. It's a really awesome tool to enhance your nonclinical job search. So, let's get to those four topics that I mentioned earlier.

The first one is connecting and networking. It's pretty common knowledge, and it's been stated in several places that up to 60% of new jobs are acquired through direct interactions with people. In other words, through networking, through word of mouth, if you want to call it that. And the features in LinkedIn are really an advanced form of online networking that you can easily take advantage of.

Now, in LinkedIn, we talked to the primary, secondary, and tertiary. I guess first degree secondary or third degree would be your terminology a lot of people used for LinkedIn. But I'll give you an example. I've nurtured my list to some extent over these last six years since I started my podcast. And according to my LinkedIn profile, I have 2,700 almost 2,800 followers. Most of those are actually first degree connections. There's a small number of people who follow me but aren't really connections because I haven't followed them back. But let's just say it's at least 2,500.

Now, if you were to look at my list of secondary connections, if you take all those 2,500, 2,600 and then add all of their connections to my list, that would bring my second degree connections up to 1.3 million. That's a pretty rapid expansion. And then if you were to go to my third degree connections on LinkedIn, that brings it up to 900 million. It's pretty exponential.

But the point is that one of the reasons it's so useful is because you have a direct relationship with those first degree connections on LinkedIn. You can message them, you can interact with them, you can send them long notes, you can publish things that they will see, and it allows you to then try and expand your network further by converting those second degree connections to first degree connections. I just wanted to show you that it's pretty darn powerful.

So, what you should do once you're all set up in LinkedIn and you're to the point where you know what kind of company you want to work for, or what kind of job you want to do, or what town you want to work in, is you should start working on this issue of connecting and networking.

Now who should you reach out to if you haven't already made this aggressive attempt to expand your network? Well, basically you want to reach out to current colleagues, might be all those people you went to medical school with and went to residency your co-residents if you've completed a residency or fellowship. But then you should also reach out to alumni at any of the schools that you went to or the residency. So, you can do that directly. There's also some features in LinkedIn that allow you to do that. I'll talk about that in a minute. You can look for people that have similar interests so you can look for those when you're reaching out. You can look for recruiters, you can look for specific jobs and so forth. And then reach out and try and connect with the people that come up when you're doing those searches.

I'm like I said in my profile right now. So let's say that I want to do a search and I'm going to search for, let's say, somebody that has an interest in utilization review. Now, when I type that in, I can look for utilization review in jobs. I can look for actual UR jobs. I can look for utilization review groups. I can look for utilization review physicians. If I just look for utilization review, I'm given the option of also narrowing it down instead of narrowing it down in the search function. I can click on people, companies, jobs, groups, posts, schools, courses, events, products.

And if I look utilization review in people, and I just limit that to my first degree connections, I will find, for example, that I have a pretty long list of people in utilization review who are my first degree connections. Let me see here. Because of the nature of my list, I'm seeing basically dozens and dozens of people that are meeting the criteria of being first degree connections that have something in their profile that indicates utilization review.

Now, if I click on that and add second degree connections, the first degree it looks like I have about basically 20 pages of listings. If I show the results for the first and second degree, then it looks like I have it looks like a hundred pages. So five times as many that come up. That's if I look under connections.

Now, if I go to my network instead of my profile, there are other things that will allow me to expand my network. First of all, there's invitations. People find me through their first and second degree connections. They send me a note, invite me to follow them or to accept their invitation to connect. So, you can add those people. I'm relatively selective in that, that's why I don't only have 10,000 followers because I just really don't connect with anyone that doesn't have a valid reason to be a connection.

But then LinkedIn, if you scroll down below that section, again, this is on the My Network tab, you'll also be given other options for who to connect with. There are popular people to follow across LinkedIn that may or may not be that beneficial. But I do recognize a lot of these names because there is an overlap in some of the things that I do and some of the things that I've searched for in the past.

Then I'm provided a list of people that I might know from the University of Illinois at Chicago where I did my undergrad. So, I could go through there. And one of the fun things to do is for me to look in there and see if any of those alumni are physicians, because like I said, I like to add physicians to my network, even if they're not currently doing a nonclinical job, they may have some connection to a nonclinical or non-traditional job. So you could do that.

If I go down further, I have a list of top emerging creators to follow. I don't find that particularly useful. There's audio events listed. There are groups I might be interested based on what I've posted, based on who I'm connected with. Most of that has to do with education and training because I talk so much about careers. And let's see, what else?

There's just a number and it almost continues to go on forever. There's popular pages, again, that all seem to be related to something I've searched in the past. Joint Commission, CDC, Mayo Clinic, NCQA, which relates to quality improvement, et cetera. So, you can definitely find others to connect with by doing this.

And the other similar online social media site that I'll mention now is Doximity. Now Doximity is nowhere sophisticated and complete as LinkedIn, but you can do a lot of searches on Doximity where you can reconnect with alumni from your medical school, from your undergrad, from your residency fellowship. You can reach out, you can connect and you can grow a network pretty well on Doximity, and then you can search through and find if other people are doing something you're interested in.

I think the functionality is not anywhere near as sophisticated as LinkedIn. So I would focus on LinkedIn initially, but when you've exhausted your search on LinkedIn and some of the other things we're going to talk about today, then you could go to Doximity.

Now, when you're trying to connect, let's say you're connecting with someone who's a second degree connection, you're limited on a number of characters, so you can do a message of about 300 characters. It's funny because technically LinkedIn says you really shouldn't connect with people that you don't already know. But at the same time, it enables you to look for people you have a very tenuous relationship with in terms of it may just be knowing someone that they know, but it does allow you to send those messages. You can get the premium level of LinkedIn.

And I've used that from time to time, and in fact, I think you can still do what I've done in the past, and then is use it for a month or two to make the connections you want because you're able to put a longer message and you're able to reach out to third degree connections if you need to using the premium version of LinkedIn last I checked. But then I usually drop off after a month or two and go back to the regular version because a lot of times I don't really do anything actively on LinkedIn for several months at a time.

Anyway, you send a short message to them, ask them to connect and includes something that would be an enticement, not a reward for connecting, but just what is the nature of the connection? Why are you reaching out to them? I get requests all the time to say, "Well, I do this. I'm in AI and I'd like to connect." And there's no real good reason.

But actually another good example of me using LinkedIn is for my podcast. I will do a very short message and I'll say, "Hey, I'm a physician. I'm a family physician. I have a podcast. I'd like to connect and tell you more about the podcast to see if you'd like to be a guest." Sometimes it has to be shorter than that. I don't know how many characters that was. And then they'll invariably accept and then I do a follow up message, and that one can be much longer.

I have found that there are certain people that prefer to interact on LinkedIn. I like to fairly quickly get them switched over to my email address. That's a personal preference depending on who you're connecting with. You may want to say, "Well, I'm going to connect with recruiters, but until I have a good reason to really follow up with them, I'm not going to give them my email list." That makes perfect sense.

But anyway, if you connect with someone and you think it's going to be a useful long-term connection, then yeah, you can make that decision of whether to send them over to your email rather than to continue to engage on LinkedIn because, for me, I sometimes go a week or so where I'm not looking at LinkedIn, even though I get probably 20, 30 notices a day that something was posted that might be of interest unless I have a reason I don't sometimes go back.

The other thing is, this is how we network. We get this larger group of connections, and then we can later on go back to them and if they have a particular skill, a particular niche that they're working in, or particular role, then we could try and engage them. And then at some point the purpose is to find out if they can refer you to more information about a job or a career or a group or something like that. The other thing to remember when you're doing networking is that you should try to have something of value that you can provide to them, if at all possible. It's always better to figure out how you can assist somebody else before asking them to assist you.

Now, as I'm talking mostly about physicians, we generally are very good about serving as mentors. We're generally very good about sharing information. Definitely everybody that I know in the nonclinical world that's a physician who's a coach or has expertise in a certain nonclinical area, they love sharing that and they'll be glad to respond to an email or a text if that's what you're using.

Just because we're taught to be preceptors, we're taught to teach medical students and other clinicians. But you should try to figure out a way that you can be of benefit to them. It could be something as simple as sharing an article or information about a course that you believe they may find useful or interesting.

But keep that in mind. Anytime we're talking about mentors and free coaches and I guess you could call them sponsors in some cases. We need to really keep in mind the idea of giving back to them as much as we can before expecting them to help us.

One of the reasons I'm doing this LinkedIn presentation today is because I was reminded by Dr. Heather Fork that there's some recent changes to LinkedIn. And I was listening to her course, which I bought a year or so ago. She was talking about an alumni hack where you can reach out to alumni at your medical school or residency and try to contact someone in that alumni list who's working at a company that you wish to work for.

And if you can get that connection to someone who's already there, we say the alumni, because your own class may only have a limited number of people that graduated from that class, especially if it was a small residency program or fellowship. But there's probably 10 times that many alumni.

And alumni typically are very willing to engage with other alumni. The hack is to find one of those alumni that are working at a company you want to work at, reach out to them, and if possible get some advice and even have that alumnus present your resume to the hiring manager or the director of HR or something like that. So, you can really leverage LinkedIn and some of the connections that you might have out there waiting to hear from you.

Now, the other features that you can use in LinkedIn include the job search and recruiters functions. If you look on your profile under jobs, you'll see a set of jobs that are recommended for you based on how you've set up your profile. Sometimes as you're looking for one of these new jobs, it's good to just start going through the job. First look at the title and see if it makes any sense. If it does seem to be a qualified type of job that you're looking for, just click on it and then scroll down on the right to the description.

And the first thing is look at the job requirements, because that's gone be the thing that will affect whether you're wasting your time or not. If it says you have to have a residency or specialty, or you have a certain license or maybe some of these jobs, they have multiple licenses in different states, or at least have one license. Some of the nonclinical jobs may not require any license, but if you want to cut the time wasted going through all the description of the job and locations and so forth, again, the first thing is look at the requirements of the job.

And in the process of doing that, see if there is someone on what they say "meet the hiring team." And then you can potentially get a name and then go to their profile and then ask to connect with them. You can learn a lot from recruiters. Now, there are several types of recruiters. There are those that are freelance or work for third parties, and there are those that work for particular companies. A large company will have its own set of recruiters. Sometimes they'll call them talent management team or the hiring team. And you can go and click on that name, which will bring you to their profile. And then you can see whether this person is a contingency type of recruiter, or someone who is a retained recruiter.

Contingency is they get paid once someone is found to fill that slot, no matter how long it takes and how much effort it takes. The retained is paid in amount over time, and as soon as the payments stop, they stop looking whether or not they have filled that slot. It's good to understand that, and again, to understand the distinction in between an internal and external recruiters.

But by doing this and leveraging the networking and recruitment features of LinkedIn, you can definitely make a lot more progress than you otherwise would. There's a lot of other tips and hacks that you can do which really brings me back to what I started to talk about a minute ago, and that is this course that Dr. Heather Fork put together. And really to me, there is no other course specifically built for physicians to do this.

This may sound just a 30 minute ad for the course, but one of the things I try to do is find resources for people. And I can only explain so much on a podcast. I actually have a video on my Nonclinical Career academy, which I'm probably going to make free at this time because really it's outdated. Whereas a course like Dr. Fork's, it's always constantly updated. In fact, she sent a notice out lately that there's several things on LinkedIn that were updated and changed the terminology and so forth. So, she updated her course.

But it's by far the best course to teach physicians how to create and leverage their LinkedIn profile. And the course is called LinkedIn for Physicians. So, that kind of says it all right there, and I really recommend it. I am an affiliate for it, I guess because I do a lot of affiliate marketing for other people's courses that I think are good. And so, if you want to check it out, you can go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/linkedincourse. And look at over, it'll tell you what the different sections are. But it really does a comprehensive overview of how to set up your initial profile, how to use all the bells and whistles, and then to leverage it, to connect and to engage and to find companies, to find jobs, to find recruiters, and how to set it up in a way that isn't going to necessarily interfere with your current job, for example.

There are ways to make sure that it's not shared with certain people, and I would definitely encourage that as a follow up to today's podcast if you feel like you haven't already created a really good LinkedIn profile, and if you think you might use the other features that it really takes a while to get used to them and to find them, unless you're using it a lot. And a course like this would definitely accelerate that process. And really the cost of the course is extremely reasonable for what you're getting.

All right, with that, I'm going to end today's presentation. I thank you for listening today.

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The post Top Tips to Find Your First Nonclinical Job Using LinkedIn – 303 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

How to Use a Professional Organization on the Road to a New Career – 272

John Jurica — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 21:30:20 +0000

An Important Tactic to Speed Up Your Progress

Today's episode is devoted to the selection and use of a professional organization while pursuing a nonclinical career.

This is the third presentation in the series on the 12 Month Roadmap to a New Career. Episodes 269 and 271 addressed other steps in the process. Early in the process of career transition, it is important to identify and join a pertinent professional society or association.

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.

Why Use a Professional Association?

There are several helpful resources that an association, society, or college can provide. The following can be found in most organizations:

Education and training
Mentorship
Coaching
Journal or newsletter
Certification(s)
Networking
Podcasts or YouTube Channel
Job Listings

Professional Organizations

There are 2 handouts on this topic I have:

A 3-page list of 70 Nonclinical and Unconventional Jobs for Physicians that you can access.
A table that displays the features of 21 of the most popular professional organizations with available services.

Summary

Using the services of an appropriate professional organization, you can network and find a mentor, take a course to learn the jargon, engage a dedicated coach, or find a journal, podcast, or video channel to help prepare you for your first nontraditional job.

NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode.

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The post How to Use a Professional Organization on the Road to a New Career – 272 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

How to Network Effectively on the Road to a New Career – 271

John Jurica — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 12:15:05 +0000

How to Network Effectively on the Road to a New Career

Today's episode describes how to network during Phase 2 of The 12 Month Roadmap to a New Career.

A few years ago, I devised a 12-month plan of action that would lead to your first CMO job. The first month of this roadmap was introduced in Episode 269.

In today's episode, we focus on an essential task that begins in the Second Phase of the Roadmap.

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.

How to Network

What is “networking?”

It is the process of interacting with others to exchange information and develop professional or social contacts. It involves leveraging the relationships you already have to expand the number of such relationships.

When considering a career transition, networking is crucial, especially if you're considering a change to an entirely new industry. Networking can be used to find a mentor, discover new jobs openings, and obtain an introduction to a hiring manager or human resources department director.

The usual ways to network are through:

face-to-face at a meeting or conference;
online on sites designed for networking, such as Doximity and LinkedIn; and,
online using professional organizations such as the American Association for Physician Leadership, the Medical Science Liaison Society, or the American Medical Writers Association, all of which facilitate networking between members.

Networking Etiquette

Networking is a two-way street. Always try to be helpful to members of your network by finding useful connections for them, and facilitating their goals.

Start slowly, and nurture your connections over time.

Never place unreasonable demands on your network members.

Dr. John Jurica's Advice

…you need to approach people respectfully and considerately and not make it feel like you're going to be a burden… Don't make it feel like a mentor has to be accountable for your career… a good rule of thumb is to remember to ask for advice, not for a job…

Summary

It is best to engage in networking on a daily or weekly basis. Spend 30 to 60 minutes concentrating on growing your network, possibly 30 minutes each on LinkedIn and Doximity. Discover additional contacts, establish connections with them, and then start communicating with them through social media or email, and eventually consider a live call if it makes sense. But keep it short, and find a way to reciprocate with your “connections.”

NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode.

EXCLUSIVE: Get a daily dose of inspiration, information, news, training opportunities, and amusing stories by CLICKING HERE.

Links for Today's Episode:

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 271

How to Network Effectively on the Road to a New Career

John: All right. Well, let's get into this conversation about networking. Let me tell you a little story. I always thought that networking was kind of a dirty word. I'm an introvert, I'm not good at small talk. And I remember going to various conferences and meetings and they would say, "Okay, at four o'clock, at the end of the formal presentations, we would have networking time." And there would be a bunch of tables and you could have snacks, maybe something to drink, and you're supposed to introduce yourself and just chat with others who are going to the meeting. And I typically would go for a few minutes, maybe have a snack. That could be my short dinner, and then I'd leave. I'm not good at networking in that fashion. I'm not good at commiserating with people and making small talk, although I should have been networking for whatever I was there for the meeting so I could get more out of the meeting.

But that's just me. But I think it's very common. Physicians often say "We don't need to network." But obviously if you're doing something different from your typical clinical career, you might need to network to find a job or to connect with people to start a business, something like that, which I'll go into in a minute.

Let's step back. Let's look at networking and what it really is. To jump ahead a little bit, I would say now I'm very good at networking but the way I network is by podcasting. Since I started my podcast, and even while I was doing the blog, somewhat, that generates interest because people look at it and I post things on Facebook and I post things on LinkedIn and people respond to me. They start to listen. And then on top of that, I bring on guests to my podcast. Now I've developed a network of about 200 former guests, and that's led to participating with them at conferences. And so, actually that is how I got into really the most effective form of networking for me, which is the podcast.

Now, we're not talking about that primarily today, but I just want to let you know that I've kind of done a turnaround. And it turns out networking is very important when you're thinking about career transition, particularly if you're looking at career transition to a completely different field.

Now, as we talk about, of course, we're looking at using our healthcare background, our medical background, but we're going to move from, let's say, patient care to a non-patient care nonclinical activity. Again, let's go back to the basics and then we'll walk through this process and I'll touch on why it's important and really some tips on how to do it at this phase if you're working through this 12-month roadmap.

So, what is networking? It's a process of interacting with others to exchange information and develop professional or social contacts. That's kind of the base of what it is. And there usually has to be a goal that is accompanying that. But the main crux of networking is it involves growing the network as you're accessing the network. In other words, you use your current smaller network to develop a larger network. And so, it's often depicted as nodes with multiple connections. So, you might have three connections, but each of those three develop three more for you and it goes out and it's sort of exponential. If you do it properly, you can create a very large network.

I would say the most that people that focus heavily on this are recruiters and people who are in business trying to sell things, because the bigger the network, the more potential sales they can make to clients or customers. Networking really for us is usually used for several purposes. Just starting and growing a business, a club, a social group or whatever, you're trying to get more people, but people network sometimes as they're trying to get into a school. And because it helps to have connections at that school, medical school, college, whatever it might be.

So, there's a lot of networking that goes into that, and it's used to find an expert to help learn a new skill. A big piece of networking and how you network and what you do while you're networking is not to just jump to the sales, let's say if you're a salesman or not to just jump to asking for a job if you're interested in a career, but to learn about the whole aspect of the career, the job, the school you might be applying to.

There's a step in between that we're going to talk about in a minute. But to a large extent, networking is great to learn a new skill because you can connect with different people that have that skill and they all have different perspectives and you can learn from that. And then that will lead you into the next step in your networking, which is to actually use it to find a job in our case.

And like I said, for me, podcasting, and networking was great for finding guests. I network on LinkedIn. I find people that are physicians who are doing different jobs. I recruit them, they come on the podcast. I also do that by asking others in my existing network to give me referrals of others who might be a good guest. And sometimes people just call me or email me and just give me ideas without me even soliciting them. The power of a good network is, it's very active and it's very productive.

And so, in the old days, of course, how do we network? How did we network? In the old days it was, "Okay, you're going to network face-to-face." As I said, you'll go to a meeting and then afterward there'll be networking time. There are certain meetings where half the time for the meeting is networking time because it might be a professional organization that is putting on a meeting. Something like the AAPL, the American Association for Physician Leadership, the MSL Society, the American Medical Writers Association. They have meetings and a lot of times big parts of their meetings are spent in networking or just getting together with other people, discussing what they're doing with respect to that job or that profession. And they learn from one another in an informal way rather than sitting in a 30, 60, or 90-minute lecture. That's face-to-face.

You can do the same thing online. There are professional organizations that I just mentioned where you can actually network online through the organization. If you go to their websites and many other professional organizations, you're able to connect with them through messaging within the website for that particular organization. This brings me to the third, which is online social media. LinkedIn is probably the best. the best example. LinkedIn is an online profile, but it includes networking, it includes education, it includes a lot of other things besides just putting your profile up for people to look at.

And the other one that most of us should know about, that probably we should use more than I have in the past. And that's Doximity. You can go into Doximity. You can connect with a lot of people that already are in your life or were in your life. People you went to college with, people who you went to medical school with, people that you were in residency with, and then also the alumni from those organizations. So, that expands it very quickly.

And you can network obviously through Doximity directly because you can message people in Doximity and you can definitely do that on LinkedIn. And there are lots of strategies for improving and enlarging your network on LinkedIn by messaging people, you can pay extra to be able to message more people, and so forth. We're going to talk a little bit about that. But that's used oftentimes in a business to find leads. But we're going to be using it again to do two things basically, which again, I'll get into a little detail, but mostly it's to learn and then to contact people that can help you.

Those are the big ones. And then there might be some other ways that you can think of, but those are the ones that come to mind when we think about networking today. A lot more is remote. You can do it through blogs, you can do it through social media, and a lot of professional organizations, again, in an online fashion. And then you can call people. You can get on the phone and do networking.

Let me give you some examples of where networking really helps, some of the physicians I've talked to. We'll just call this one a cardiologist Dr. F. She had worked 25 years in her own practice and was an employed cardiologist. And she just reached the point where she wanted to do something different. And so basically, she started by contacting two medical school colleagues that she knew of. Each of them was working already as a medical director or an associate medical director in a life insurance company, which you don't find those people that come of, for some reason they were doing this.

And again, I don't know if she used Doximity or LinkedIn, but she knew that they were doing this. And then it occurred to her to contact them. And she started by asking them, not "Is there a job you can tell me about?" but she asked them about the job. She asked them to describe the job, did they like the job? What did they like, and what did they not like? She found that they were very happy in their jobs.

At that point, she moved to the next step to learn more about what a medical director for a life insurance company does. And then she started looking for jobs. She went online, she looked at different insurance companies based on what she was told by her colleagues. And really it only took her about six months and she landed her first job. Now that was a very accelerated process. Most of us will not find that job. Most of us, number one, will try to sift through different careers before we end up on one when we choose one. We might say it's something in pharma, maybe something in the hospital, maybe we want to do UM. Figure out which of those best suits our personality.

But she just kind of talked to her colleagues. They focused her right away on that particular job. She decided to specifically pursue that based on what they had told her. Then she went back and did the other things on LinkedIn and through other contacts found some companies that had openings, applied to those, and landed her first job in a little over six months, which is remarkable.

Now, another one of the colleagues that I've talked to on my podcast, Dr. H, she did the same thing. She decided she was going to leave medicine and she had no idea what to do, but she did start to zone in on pharma jobs. Now, in pharma jobs, most pharma companies have at least six to nine major divisions of which three or four of those employ physicians. Everything from basic clinical and research and applied research and so forth to sales. Most physicians don't go onto the sales side, but they go oftentimes into the MSL side.

She started looking, she thought she would do something in pharma. She didn't feel she was qualified for anything on the research side because of her background. And she started looking at profiles on LinkedIn of people that were doing pharma. And that gave her the ability to see what the different jobs were because they were describing the jobs that they did and then she could look those up. And then she would contact the people on LinkedIn and she would have short conversations, again, mostly about learning. "What does that entail? What do you do? What are the requirements?"

And by the way, I'm going to get into how you do this interaction in a minute. But she did that and she decided that the medical science liaison was the one she wanted to pursue. So, she started posting her resume. Well, she did several things. First of all, learned she needed to convert her CV to a resume, and she did that. And then she started sending her resumes into online sites that hired MSLs and there were hundreds and hundreds of jobs. And she told me there were some days when she was sending her resume to 200 different sites. And for months would have no return on that at all.

It wasn't really until she was able to network sufficiently to find somebody in one of the companies that she was applying to. That person, that recruiter, that HR person was able to then look for the resume when it was sent in. I think she probably sent it also directly to that person because there's a lot of screening that goes on through that online process. But anyway, after doing that, she got one job after applying to thousands of positions. And that was all it took because then that later allowed her to move to other jobs and other jobs. In fact, I think she even eventually moved out of the MSL role completely.

But those are two examples, and they were both based on networking. In one case it started with networking with people that you really were close to. And in the other case it was randomly reaching out, facilitating, and creating relationships with people and then using those to focus in on a particular job and to connect with someone that could then help facilitate that process.

When you're thinking about networking like this, and you probably can tell from what I've said so far, you need to focus on at some point what it is you're going to use it for. Again, I always say there are different phases. Early in your networking, you should tell yourself, "Look, I'm mostly networking so I can find people that might be doing the type of job I would want to do. I'm trying to confirm that. And then I'm trying to learn from them what the job entails now."

And sometimes, they can point you in directions to things like professional organizations and societies that often, as I said, have some formal networking built in the organization. But you wouldn't know to go to that organization until you were told by someone in your network that that's what you should do. And then you should do that for a while. You should use those people as mentors, but later then you need to start using them as connectors either to a recruiter or a company or hiring manager, or even sometimes they connect you directly to the head of the department or the division that's hiring. Those are all the people in an organization that ultimately you want to get to. So, you can send them your resume and cover letter rather than sending it blindly to some online portal.

Let's talk a minute about creating this network. And it may not be so much creating the network as defining your network. So, your network already exists. Whether you use a network or not, it already exists. Your network is people that you know, people that you're acquainted with, and people that you've interacted in the past with, and that includes the following.

And actually, what I want you to do as part of the process of doing this networking is I want you to write down and define your current network. And so, you're going to make a list, and I want you to not filter it at all because it's easy to drop people off later that may perhaps for some reason aren't really useful for your networking. But when you're creating the initial list, you should put all these people down. You can type them out, you can write them out by hand, you can put on stickies, you can do whatever you like.

But let's just try to think through this process during the rest of this episode, and also sit down and do it later. So, make a list, of all your family, and all your friends. You might even put down is there some way that they could be helpful to my career search? Because certain family and friends will be, and certain ones won't. You might have family and friends who are physicians. Okay, that's an automatic in. Do they have friends? Do they have colleagues? Do they have knowledge? You've maybe never spoken to them about that. So, you're going to go to your cousin who's a physician in another town and say, "Hey, are you still practicing? Do you have friends who are doing nonclinical? Do you know anything about that? What can you tell me?"

So, you got family, friends, college classmates, and alumni. You have a connection to the alumni even though you may not have worked directly with them. But let's face it, if you were in university, you were probably pre-med if you're a physician or pre-nursing if you're a nurse. And so most people that you went to school with were in the same program. Now they're doing that job as well. You may not have been with them in medical school, you may not have been with them in residency, but now they still may be practicing and maybe they've moved on to a nonclinical position.

And you do have that connection with the alumni if you've ever called somebody or met somebody and said "You and I went to the same medical school." But anyway, you had things in common with that person. Maybe you're both living in the same area because you went to the same school. Maybe you both went to a similar residency after medical school. But again, those are connections. The alumni is not as strong a connection as a classmate, but it is a connection. So, write all those things down.

Now, as we get into medical school classmates and alumni, you can expand on those lists. Instead of just going by memory or maybe you've got a roster from your class. Maybe you were in a huge medical school class and you've got a roster from that class from 10 or 15 years ago. Maybe you have a roster of all the alumni from that medical school. Some schools publish that. If you don't, you can go to other places. You can go to Doximity at doximity.com and LinkedIn, linkedin.com, and you can start looking and you can start searching.

So, you can search, for example, in LinkedIn by college and medical school. You can search in Doximity the same way. And then you can start to build that and refresh your memory. Maybe you'll see that in Doximity this physician is there and you go, "Oh yeah, I remember that person." But you never would've remembered that person. And actually, Doximity is built to connect you with your former classmates and alumni because it actually prompts you to add those people. LinkedIn doesn't do that. You have to search for them, but LinkedIn has other things that help you to network.

And then you've got your residency and fellowship, your classmates if you want to call them that, co-residents, and the alumni from those. And then you can move up to coworkers in your current and previous jobs, whether you're employed in a practice. What about all the physicians that run the medical staff when you were on that 500-bed hospital's medical staff? And you're not going to know all those people, but this is a source and you can start to look them up, see what they're doing.

And then, in this whole mix is a very, very, very tiny group of networking colleagues who are going to be the references for your job search. Maybe I should put it right at the very beginning. But keep them in mind because you're going to use them. You're going to ask them to be a reference. That's first of all. They're close to you, they know you, and they support you already. But you want to treat them like you will the rest of the members of this network that you're creating. And you want to ask them or let them know what you're doing, see if they have colleagues that are doing something that you might want to do because that's going to be really the strongest connection you'll have. If you're using a family member, a close friend, or a reference who's a professional reference for the next job you might be applying for, they're going to be very supportive and it's going to help you a lot.

One thing you should do in this process is cross reference the different sources if you can. So, what I mean by that is, like what I've mentioned, if there's someone in your network that you know through somebody else already and they're on your list, you should look them up on LinkedIn because you want to make sure you understand where they are now. Now not everyone will be on LinkedIn, but between Doximity and LinkedIn, you should be able to tell what they're doing.

And so, this is part of the research you're going to do at the beginning of the process. Let's say that you had a roster of 30 people that you went to medical school with. Well, you might just go to LinkedIn and Doximity and look them up and see what they're doing now. Now those sites aren't always kept up to date, but they're usually pretty accurate. I find LinkedIn to be a little more current than Doximity but Doximity has more people that are clinical than let's say LinkedIn would have.

All right, enough about that. You want to create this thing and you want to write it down. There are probably software programs you can use if you were in sales or something, but it's really not necessary because you're only going to be using this for the most part temporarily while you're in this, what I call a 12-month roadmap to a new career. So, we're getting started on this part early in this roadmap.

As you begin to contact these individuals, well, let's talk about how you're going to contact them. You can email them. You can message them through a professional organization as I've mentioned. You can message or contact them through social media. Of course, LinkedIn is set up to do that. Doximity is set up to do that. But maybe you're connected through Twitter or some other thing. Maybe you're both posting on clinical topics or you're both posting about how much burnout you have or what have you. You can reach out that way.

But then of course is a lot of networking that goes on in person. So, you meet people, specifically, let's say I have a medical society that I participate with where I am. And so, even though I don't work with these people anymore, because I don't work in this county, I'm always running into these other physicians and I can keep up with them and say, "Hey, what's going on? Are you still practicing?" And someone will say, "Well I started some sidelines, some side businesses, side hustles, whatever you want to call them. I'm doing something different. I'm looking about changing to this or that." That's in person at a meeting, which the meeting would be for another purpose, but there you go. You're going to meet them face to face. And then just getting on a phone call. Say, "Can we have a quick call?" With my podcast and what I've been doing and courses and so forth, I usually get on a Zoom call. I like to be able to see the person as though I am talking to them face to face. But obviously, it's remote.

Some bits of advice about how to be when you're networking. Even though we all pretty much know what a network is, we know what it's for, it's unseemly and it's off-putting if you come on aggressively. Get on the phone or send somebody an email saying "I just decided I'm going to look for a nonclinical job. I'm really reaching out to everybody I know and I'd like it if you could spend 30 minutes on a call with me to tell me what you're doing." No, you have to be, it's like when I've talked about using a mentor. You cannot put so much pressure on the mentor and someone in your network in a way is a mentor or could be a mentor.

And so there shouldn't be a lot of pressure. In fact, it should be very light at the beginning. You should be authentic, you should be yourself, and you should be considerate. And you want to spend however you're connecting with that person, whether it's via email, asynchronously or synchronously on a call of some sort, or through a messaging function. Just connect. That's it. Just connect. Connect and remind them who you are and ask them some questions about themselves. The people who are the most popular at parties or even in any kind of get-together are those who ask the most questions and listen to the answers.

So, you don't go at somebody and ask them to tell you what you should do and how you should learn this new skill and who should you apply to? Can you give me the name of somebody? That should all be later. In the beginning, you want to be slow, you want to be considerate. And if you can at all, figure out some way you can help them first.

Now it may sound hokey, but if you can give a compliment, that always helps. That also tells you that you know them. Let's say that you heard them speak or that someone referred you to them that told you, "Hey, this is a nice person. They're very knowledgeable." Bring that up and then ask them some questions. "How have you been? What are you doing? I'm really curious to find out whether you're still practicing or not." And really you have to take this slow. It's a nurturing process.

Now, you don't want to do this over a period of 10 different meetings, but you need to approach people respectfully and considerately and not make it feel like you're suddenly going to be a burden. And again, mention this with mentors. Don't make it feel like a mentor has to be accountable for your career. It's not. The point of a mentor is to answer questions and keep you from making mistakes. Same thing with networking to some extent.

And I think a good thing, a good rule of thumb is to really remember to ask for advice and try not to ask for the job or a job. "Do you know anyone who can hire me? Or are you hiring right now for this position? I heard that you work for this and you're a medical director or you're a CMO or a VP." No, ask first for advice. People like giving advice. "Hey, is there something I can do to maybe learn more about this?" And they'll tell you about a book. They'll tell you about an organization. They'll tell you about a blog or something like that. It should be brief to the point and not be onerous to that person. And take your time, develop and nurture those relationships.

So, what not to do? Sometimes it's easier to say what not to do. Do not monopolize your colleagues' time and don't focus only on what you need or want. That should come later and gradually. That's basically what I wanted to say about networking. You'll find as I have that there are ways to network that are very gentle for yourself as well as the other person that is not overwhelming for either of you.

Networking works best if you can do a little bit each day or each week. Spend 30 minutes to an hour focusing on that. Maybe focus 30 minutes on LinkedIn, and 30 minutes on Doximity. Find more people, connect with them, and then start spending time sending them a message or an email or eventually after interacting a couple of times having a live call of some sort with them. I think the process of starting with education and then moving to referrals is a good one. And really once you get this thing rolling, it kind of continues on its own. For example, when I started my LinkedIn profile and tried to build a network, I had to go out and actively try and figure out who I wanted to reach out to.

Now I have people every day asking me to connect 2, 3, 4 a day. I don't have a huge LinkedIn following, but I've got a couple thousand. And just the other day I was looking for a new podcast guest. And so, I just went through the recent people that connected with me, I looked at what their backgrounds were, picked out some that were physicians that were doing nonclinical work. I reached out to them and two of them agreed to come on to my podcast.

Well, the parallel is, okay, you're going to reach out, you're going to interact with people, you're going to connect with them. Maybe you'll have a phone call. You'll find out that they're doing a nonclinical job that you would like to do. You're going to learn more about that from them in little tiny snippets. And then eventually you're going to ask them to keep their eyes open, if any jobs open up where they're working if it's something geographically that fits with you.

I think that's all I want to say today about networking. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at john.jurica.md@gmail.com or go to the website at nonclinicalphysicians.com and look around. You can join my email list. And then when you're on my list and you get my emails, if you respond, it actually comes to that same email address. It comes directly to me. It doesn't get filtered out. So, you can do that.

The show notes for today's episode can be found at nonclinicalphysicians.com/how-to-network.

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The post How to Network Effectively on the Road to a New Career – 271 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

Podcast Blast From the Past: 8 Mistakes That Derail a Job Search – 270

John Jurica — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 12:30:22 +0000

And How to Avoid Them

This week, we revisit the 8 mistakes that will derail a job search from Episode 180.

You can find the show notes for the original episode HERE.

8 Mistakes

#1 – Tunnel vision and not keeping an open mind.

You probably aren't aware of many nonclinical positions.

Medicine is the ultimate stack of skills: physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, other scientific disciplines, communication, how to use technology, and how to think logically. Not to mention all the attitudes and characteristics you've accumulated over time: dependability, responsibility, focus, intensity, resilience, and leadership.

You shouldn't be in a rush to start and complete this process. Take your time, contemplate, and consider the kind of circumstance you want to be in one to five years from now. Start your research and explore a variety of nonclinical jobs before narrowing your search.

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.

#2 – Being intimidated by a job description.

Looking at job postings in a variety of industries is a good way to begin. But the second of 8 mistakes is becoming intimidated by them. That long list of experiences and credentials includes many “nice to have” items. It is a rare candidate who meets all of them.

Early in the process, the primary reason to review job postings is to understand the expectations of the job, and the jargon that is used by those in that industry. That will help you to decide whether to pursue it and identify actions to take now to enhance your chances of landing it later.

#3 – Preparing a CV rather than a resumé.

A CV (curriculum vitae) is a long list of publications, presentations, educational experiences, and degrees obtained. When searching for a nonclinical position, most employers expect to receive a resumé that highlights your accomplishments and skills.

Those accomplishments typically describe quantifiable results. That enables an employer to imagine how you will deliver results and solve a problem for them.

You should limit the length of your resume to two pages. And a one-page resumé may be sufficient for younger candidates just getting started.

#4 – Using the same cover letter and resume for different jobs or different industries.

Each job has unique requirements. Your resumé and cover letter should demonstrate why you meet the requirements for each specific posting being sought.

A generic cover letter and resumé imply that you don't know in which job you are most interested and for which you are best suited.

#5 – Depending too much on online applications and not leveraging networks.

Sending your resumé to a specific recipient is preferable to submitting it blindly to an anonymous online destination. It is best to identify someone to send it to such as a recruiter or someone in the human resources (HR) department.

Sometimes you will need to network to find such a contact. Reconnecting with old medical school classmates, former co-residents, and people you've practiced with can be helpful.

And, you can use Doximity, LinkedIn, or other social media sites to nurture relationships with those employed at one of your prospective employers.

#6 – Not learning the jargon of the field we’re pursuing

Every field has, in a sense, its own language. The 6th of the 8 mistakes is not learning to speak that language when applying for and interviewing for a job. Learn the jargon by reviewing job descriptions, reading industry publications, and attending meetings for industry insiders.

#7 – Not taking the interview seriously

There are several common mistakes that demonstrate a lack of experience and preparation for live interviews, including

not bringing extra copies of your resumé,
dressing inappropriately,
arriving early, and,
talking too much, and listening too little.

#8 – Not preparing sufficiently

Read and reread the job description so that you can respond intelligently to questions about your suitability for the job. Thoroughly research the company, and its mission, vision, and values. Understand its financial situation.

If the company is a nonprofit organization, look up its 990 Form on Guidestar.org. Review stock reports if the company is publicly traded. And read its past 3 years of annual reports if available.

BONUS Mistakes to AVOID:

#1 – Failure to prepare a COMPLETE LinkedIn Profile. Many employers look at your LinkedIn profile. You will improve your chances of being invited for an interview by filling in the gaps in your profile.

#2 – After the interview, but before accepting the offer, not investigating the employer with other employees, customers, and physicians to determine if it will be a good fit for you.

Summary

There is no perfect applicant for any job. Your mission is to demonstrate to your potential employer that you have sufficient skills, knowledge, and attitudes to meet its needs and help advance the mission of the organization.

Applying for a job and performing well during interviews is a set of skills that improve with practice. Don't be discouraged because it takes time and repetition to improve. By avoiding the above errors, you will improve your chances of landing that new job more quickly.

NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode.

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Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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Transcription - PNC Episode 270

Podcast Blast From the Past: 8 Mistakes That Derail a Job Search

I recently joined Michelle Mudge-Riley and her free webinars to talk about mistakes that will derail a job search. We listed the major ones that we have witnessed and took questions from the audience. So, I thought I would spend some time talking about those today and summarize what we discussed.

I had to narrow it down to just eight today because there are just numerous mistakes that can be made. Now having said that, I do want to say again that I was on a call with Michelle Mudge-Riley. We were answering questions and going through many of these. So, I stole one or two from her. But she gave me her permission to further acknowledge what Michelle is doing by the way. Her next conference is starting in two months. I think it's on March 5th, 5th through 9th. She's going to be talking about a lot of these topics at her conference.

Her company is Physicians Helping Physicians and you can just look it up and you'll find out about her conference. But again, I want to thank her for inviting me on her webinar. And I know she's going to have a great conference in March and then there'll be a second one later in the year. I think it's in November. So, she had three last year and they were fantastic. So, with that, let's move into today's content.

Now I'm going to try and go through and even bring up examples as I go, because I've seen all of these and I've made a few of these mistakes myself. I think these are kind of the bigger mistakes that I've seen.

If you make a mistake in the process, it's not going to be the end of the world. You're still going to get that nonclinical job, but the fewer mistakes you make and the more prepared you are going in, the quicker this job transition will occur.

So, here are the mistakes that will derail a job search.

Number one: tunnel vision and not keeping an open mind. Most of us really don't even know what kind of jobs are out there. I mean, sure. We can look for another clinical job, similar to what we're doing. We can look for a better company to work for, or join a partnership that's run by doctors, that's more fun to work with.

But if we've made the decision to explore nonclinical jobs, the thing is, there are so many out there that you probably know nothing about. Now, if you've already done a little research, okay, great. But the thing is, if you narrow your focus too early, you're really shutting a lot of doors that might have otherwise eventually led to a much better outcome. I think you need to keep an open mind. You need to remain curious and you need to give yourself a chance to look around.

Now, as every coach has told me that I've interviewed and talked to, you shouldn't be in a big hurry to start and accomplish this whole process. You need to take your time, reflect, think about the kind of situation you'd like to find yourself in, in one to five years from now. And then start doing some research and expose yourself to different nonclinical jobs if that's the route you're going.

Usually, you come to a decision where it's like, "I just don't want to deal with patients because I can't avoid the liability if I'm still dealing with patients. I can't avoid the call. I can't avoid the constant pressure of feeling like I'm dealing with someone's life".

So, once you've made that decision, just step back and start looking. There are lots of resources out there, but you should really dig into what are the possible jobs. You should keep an open mind about how you will find a job. So, you think of, "Well, there's only one way to do it. The way I've done it in the past." No, keep open about the possible jobs, the possible industries and the jobs within those industries. The process for getting the job may not be as obvious as you think.

And also keep an open mind about your capabilities. I have people that say all the time, "Well, all I know is medicine" and I've addressed this before, but medicine is not one thing. Medicine is like the ultimate stack of skills - Physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, all the other sciences, communication, presentations, how to use technology and how to think. Not to mention all these attitudes and characteristics you've accumulated over time - The dependability, the responsibility and the ability to lead teams and all that. So, keep an open mind. Don't tunnel, don't get tunnel vision. That's number one.

Number two: being intimidated by a job description. So, let's say you're just exploring because you don't have to wait until you've narrowed the job to just one field in one industry. In fact, looking at job descriptions can be a way to do your research. So, look at job descriptions in a hospital work, look at job descriptions in pharma, look at job descriptions in insurance, health insurance, UM jobs, disability insurance, medical director, and health insurance.

Look at other things. Part-time gigs perhaps about expert witness work or blogs and podcasts about jobs in other industries, such as medical writing or consulting. But anyway, if you're going to actually apply for a job, ultimately you feel like you're going to work for a large corporation, which would be pharma or insurance or hospital systems.

Then even early in the process, look at the job descriptions, but don't get intimidated by them. I mean, think about it. Let's say you were running a big corporation or just your practice for that matter and you're going to hire somebody. What are you going to put in the job description" You're going to put everything in there you could possibly want and hope that somebody that has at least 80% - 90% of those skills applies. So, nobody that's applies is going to be perfect for any job.

And similarly, when a big pharma company or a hospital is putting out a job description, it's going to put everything in there that it wants. But the recruiting manager, the HR people, they know they're not going to get everything that they want. So, you can start by looking and seeing the words "preferred" versus "mandatory". So, if they say a medical degree is mandatory, well, probably a medical degree is mandatory, but if they say five years, experience is preferred. Well, that means if they get 10 candidates with five or more years experience, and you only have one, they're probably going to pick somebody from that list.

On the other hand, if nobody with five years of experience is applying and you've got three years of experience and everything else on your resume looks awesome, then you're going to get to job. So, we hear this a lot. MSLs a lot of times you're looking for someone with experience as an MSL - Medical Science Liaison, but guess what" They sometimes just have to take someone who has all the other attributes and has no experience in. I've definitely heard that from my guests who have told me it said that they wanted this, they wanted some background board certification, whatever, and yet they still were hired despite of not having every last bullet point on that job description.

Number three: preparing a CV rather than a resume. So, most of you know the difference I hope, but if not, basically it boils down to the fact that the CV is what someone who is teaching or an academics uses. And it's a list of all the education, publications, presentations. I mean, sometimes these CVs can be like 5, 6, 10 pages long, especially for an academic position.

But once you get away from applying for an academic position, it's a little different. They're looking more for a resume, which again, the definition there would be something that starts with a personal profile or a projected plan - What is it you're looking for in a few sentences and then a list of accomplishments. And those accomplishments generally indicate some measurable outcomes attached to them.

And then down the rest later on is going to be your education, your previous positions. But what's important is what you've done in those positions not so much what the position was. Because saying that you were the medical director or saying that you were the chair of a committee or whatever, it doesn't tell you really what you did. But at the same time in a resume, you want to keep it to two pages. For younger people that are just getting started, one page resume might be fine. There's no sense filling it with nonsense. But for someone who's a little more experienced, try to keep it to two pages because number one, they're not usually going to read it, but what they're going to be looking for is on the first page is, what are you looking for" And a job in X doing Y and what are the accomplishments that demonstrate that you've done the things that they're looking for as maybe outlined in the job description that's posted, or maybe someone has actually talked to you about what they're looking for.

So, if you can say, let's say rather than like "I managed this department for four years", it would be better to say "As a manager for the quality department, my team under my direction was able to reduce the complication rate following surgery, let's say total hip surgery by 20%, or reduce the costs in this service line by X percent". You get the idea.

That is what's in a resume. So, don't just throw the CV that you may have used in the past when you were looking for your residency. So, you had a CV for your history in medical school and undergrad and things you did in between, different jobs and different academic things you've done. But no, you want to put on the resume, that what you've accomplished with measurable outcomes, that they can translate into things that would be applicable to the job you're applying for now.

This one is actually one of the more important of these eight, because it's very common to have someone who has been sending out a cover letter and a resume for months and months. And after simply hiring a coach or spending a little time, doing a little more research and customizing the resume to the job they're applying for that they get that job. And it's all because of what's in that resume.

Now, I've heard recently that some companies are using a form of AI to screen their resumes, meaning they're basically looking for keywords. These are companies that are getting a lot of applications for the same position. So, this would be probably more common in a position as more of an entry level, like a UM physician advisor role, or in a big company, or maybe an MSL role. So, these jobs are very popular, starting jobs for nonclinical careers, for physicians. And it's possible that they're doing some kind of a machine screening, I guess, is what I would call it where no one's actually looking at the resume. They're just looking for the keywords that you mentioned.

So, again, I would say that when you're doing a resume, do a little research, how to structure it, there's a lot more to it than what I've mentioned. You definitely want to include keywords in your resume that tie back to the written job description and then the accomplishments and measurable outcomes. That that'll get you started. Again, there are resume coaches out there, those that are physicians and non-physicians who specialize in helping people prepare a professional resume. Because resumes are so important, let's talk about another resume mistake.

Number four: using the same cover letter and resume for different jobs or different industries. I definitely have seen resumes that seem rather generic. Even so far as in the position statement or the summary at the top saying something like "Looking for a position in leadership role in health insurance or pharma industry." That would be such a big red flag right there, because someone in pharma is going to look at that and go, "Well, I guess they don't really want to be in pharma." I mean, if they're okay with being in health insurance, that's not the same as pharma and vice versa. That's a big one right there.

The other thing is that each employer has its own needs. In my case, for example, I was put over the medical group as it was growing, as a VPMA and then Chief Medical Officer. I never did have responsibility for the medical group for like the first 10 years I worked at the hospital. I was focused on quality and utilization and clinical documentation improvement of pharmacy, the lab, so on and so forth.

There came a point when I was over the medical group, but I couldn't do it myself so I needed to have a VP for the medical group. I'm not even sure what we called that position. It may be a little different than that, but anyway and I wanted the VP to help us manage the 30 physicians that were in the group and help us grow the group as we began, not only to hire new physicians, but actually recruit local physicians who were in practice and mostly small practices.

But you can imagine if you were applying for that job, as opposed to applying for a job in a mature multi-specialty group with over a hundred physicians run by the hospital across town, that's focusing less on recruitment and less on buying practices and more on adding service lines and different products - that would be a completely different resume and cover letter. You want to customize those specifically to each and every employer.

Now, you can have a kind of a template that has 90% of the same information. If you're applying to, let's say, multiple hospitals for a director, medical director, or even a CMO role, yeah, 90% can be the same. But if you know specifics about the particular organization, which should be clear in the job description or based on your research, then you should customize the resume and the cover letter to that information and that organization. By the way, you should be sending this to a person, which I'll talk about a little bit in the next, but that goes into also customizing that cover letter.

Number five: depending too much on electronic applications and not leveraging networking. So, it kind of ties back to the resume and the cover letter. It's always better to send those to some person specifically that you've been able to identify if possible. And this also ties back to how you find the person in the first place or get the job or find the job in the first place.

I remember one time I was interviewing one of my guests who just suddenly felt anxious to leave her job. I don't actually remember why at this moment, but she was a very good clinician and she had enjoyed it for years and then she had to leave. I think maybe because she was moving or something happened to the organization she was working for. So, rather than just start looking through wide ends, so to speak and job boards, she started talking to some of her former medical school classmates. And I think maybe her residents had programs that she had attended when she did a residency, the people that were with her there.

Lo and behold, she found that some of them had nonclinical jobs. And one of them said that the company he or she was working for, needed a medical director for the company, which was a life insurance company, which are not easy jobs to come by. But she just happened to be in the right place at the right time. She applied, she landed the job and she loves the job. She's been there. I think more than 10 years at this point.

Now how likely is at the happen" Not that likely that the first person gives you some advice, you're going to take the job and you're going to love it, but you just never know. But I tell you in a way, getting a job referral, because that person knows you, they know what you're like. They know perhaps your strengths and weaknesses. They're going to tell you about jobs that they think you're going fit in with.

Definitely, I've had many guests on my podcast tell me that sending resumes into a link on a website or on a job board, or let's say through indeed or something, they think it's a waste of time. Literally for the MSL position, I've had people tell me that, that did not work. And then when they had someone they could actually reach out to or refer to from a friend or something, they did much better.

Networking is a foreign concept to many of us because we're introverts. We were competitive in medical school and we worked out on our own and we accomplished what we accomplished. But we have a twisted concept of networking. It's standing around at a reception at the end of an all-day conference, handing out business cards. And really that kind of networking probably doesn't help either.

I would say the networking that you do, if it's reconnecting with old medical school classmates, former co-residents, people you've practiced with. And you could do it directly if you have their email, their phone number, or you can go on Doximity or LinkedIn, reconnect with these people, ask them what they're up to. And then you can get a little bit into the less direct knowledge group of people.

In other words, you can just start looking for keywords in LinkedIn, for example, and say, "Okay, well, who's on LinkedIn that is a medical science liaison" And maybe I can find out how they were able to transition." Or I'm looking for someone who is working in a disability company as a medical director. Or maybe I can network through a group like the American Association for Physician Leadership if I want to be a Hospital Executive or I can network through the American Medical Writers Association if I learn about becoming a medical writer, where to apply. Or maybe I can go to The American Academy of Insurance Medicine and find out how those people are getting jobs.

Networking in that sense is probably much more effective. And if you can get the name of someone and send them your cover letter and resume and possibly even call them before you send it, they're going to be looking for it and they're going to take a much closer look at it.

Number six: not learning the jargon of the field you're pursuing. Every field has as its own vernacular, so to speak. So, the terms we use in hospital management are different if we're focused just on quality improvement, although there's a lot of overlap there. But you get into clinical documentation improvement. It has its own utilization management. It has its own jargon expert witnesses, use different jargon, a lot of legalese. Pharma jobs have specific terms.

If you're an MSL and someone told me about this, that they went to apply for a job as a medical science liaison. Someone asked them about a KOL and they really didn't know what it was. They kind of answered the question, but even though I think they use the term Key Opinion Leader, but really that's what an MSL does is deal with key opinion leaders and influencers. And they use that term all the time. And if you don't know what that term is, and haven't done enough research to figure that out going in, then you really haven't done your homework. You shouldn't go into these jobs, not really knowing what you're getting into.

If you want to be sincere about becoming a medical director for a particular company, then you need to know what a medical director for that company does and the jargon that they use. And you can learn that just by joining one of these societies or just going online and Googling around and find out what MSLs talk about and find out what medical monitors talk about. If you're in pharma, you're going to want to know phase one, two, three, what is pharmacovigilance, and so on and so forth.

And then to go back to something we talked about earlier, you want to use those terms in the cover letter and the resume and during your interviews to show that you at least understand the language. You may not have experience applying those terms, or actually interacting, let's say with a key opinion leader, but you know what the term means.

Number seven: not taking the interview seriously. Now that's a vague mistake, but it's because I wanted to put multiple issues in here. So basically, it's a bunch of things that you can do wrong during the interview, because you haven't really thought through how you're going to approach the interview, but includes things like not bringing a copy of your resume. Oddly enough, people that are interviewing you might not actually have a copy. They may have had a copy. They may have looked at a copy two or three weeks ago. Now when they're doing the interview it would be nice for you to bring one, just in case they don't have it.

Maybe you are really concerned about how you dress, but you should dress professionally. It wouldn't matter if you were overdressed compared to everybody. Let's say you're working in some small clinic and everyone is semi-casual when they're working. It doesn't mean you shouldn't go in a suit. Of course, you should. You should dress up. You can always dress down when you're working, but you can't go in there sloppy and then everyone's in a suit and tie. You're not going to feel like you fit in at all and they're not going to think you are either.

If you fail to arrive early so that you can anticipate any problems, you got to give yourself time to walk around and look around. Get a feel for the organization. Go to the reception desk where you're checking in at least 10 minutes early.

Other things like you should listen more than you talk. You're not there to give them a lecture on how wonderful you are. First you have to listen from them because each person that's doing an interview has their own particular pet peeves and interests for this person moving into this job. The CEO will have a different perspective than someone that you're working alongside, or in the hospital setting, for example, the CEO, the COO, the CFO, they're all going to have different perspectives on why you should be hired or not.

And so, you need to listen to what they are interested in. If they say, "Well, here's a problem we've had..." and now you can tell them how you can address that problem. But if you just go into some long litany about why you're the greatest thing since sliced bread, it's not even going to align with the things they're looking for because you're going to be off on some tangent.

So, listen more than you talk and ask questions. Some people have said you should really only do 20% of the talking. Mostly you should be listening. So, prepare for the interview and go into it professionally. That's one mistake that I see made not infrequently. And again, it ties into mistake number eight.

Number eight: not preparing sufficiently. So, when I talked about some of the things in the previous parts, a lot of it has to do with not preparing. Not looking through the job description in detail.

Now, granted I've had this happen many times where my HR department put out a job description and I looked at it and I said, "Well, that's not really what I'm looking for" and this person is reporting to me. So, there can be a disconnect, which is why you have to ask once you're there. But you should look at it, look at the keywords they're using, look at the "must haves" and the "would like to haves" and see how you can convince them that you have similar experience. It might not be the exact experience they put in the job description or the posting. So, think about that.

And actually, do research on the position beyond that and on the organization. Now in the hospital setting, it can be quite easy because hospitals are ranked and they're measured and they're rated. And if they're a nonprofit, you can go to guidestar.org and look them up. You can look at their financials. If they're a publicly traded company, you can look at stock reports. Again, if it's a hospital, either there's rating agencies and you can get a pretty good feel about the nature of the organization, but you have to spend an hour or so, just getting their background and not walk in as though you have no idea who these people are.

Now, it can be hard. If you're applying in the large UM company, they're going to be interviewing a ton of people who are going to be doing only probably telephone or video interviews who are going to be shorter. They're not going to care if you know how well the company is doing from a basic financial standpoint, but when you get it into a smaller medical communications company or a hospital, it's going to help to know really what's going on. And that includes looking at their annual reports if they have one and looking at news in that county or that town in terms of what's going on at the company, if they're big enough to make it into the news.

So those are the main things that I wanted to mention today. So, to summarize here are the mistakes that will derail a job search.

Number 1 - Going in with tunnel vision and not keeping an open mind.

Number 2 - Being intimidated by the job description.

Number 3 - Preparing a CV rather than a resume.

Number 4 - Using the same cover letter and resume for different jobs or even different industries.

Number 5 - Depending too much on the online applications and not leveraging networks and networking as much as you should.

Number 6 - Not learning the jargon of the field that you're pursuing.

Number 7 - Not taking the interview seriously.

Number 8 - Not preparing sufficiently.

So those are the big eight. I know I'm a little over, but I do have two bonus mistakes to avoid.

One is the failure to prepare a complete LinkedIn profile. That's going to come in handy. You can get jobs by people finding your LinkedIn profile. We didn't talk about that, but let me just say quickly that you should have a recent photo in there. You might have a background picture and the whole thing should be complete. You should have a description with keywords in it. Everything you've done job wise, everything you've done education wise, anything you've published. It's very, very complete. It would be much longer than your written resume. And so, you can put a lot more in there, including all the things you volunteered for that are pertinent.

The other bonus mistake to avoid really comes afterwards and it's really not about landing the job, but it's about whether you should take the job. Let me just say this: Would you marry someone or accept or even ask for someone to marry you if you hadn't gone to more than one or two dates" Most of us wouldn't.

So, you should do some digging and learn more about the employer after the interview is done in terms of what it's like to work there. You can do that beforehand to some extent, but don't just jump into a job that you might be at for 10 or 15 years if it works out. You don't want to be stuck in that thing and be back where you're starting now. So, talk to other employees, talk to customers, talk to other physicians.

Check and see if there is physician leadership in the organization. The more physician leadership, the less likely you're going to work where there's a lot of burnout. Because physicians managing physicians generally do a better job and there's usually more engagement, less burnout.

Like I say, most of us don't make or accept a marriage proposal after one or two dates. And those that do are often disappointed. So, the same thing applies to most jobs. You'll be married to this new employer potentially for decades. So, do more research work, walk the halls. If there are nurses involved in what you're doing, ask them because they know all the doctors, they know all these things that are going on, especially in a clinical situation. But talk to someone similar to a nurse position if you're looking at a MSL job or UM job too.

Okay, that's it. I am going too long now. I want you to go get that new job, avoid all these mistakes that I mentioned today. Thanks for listening. I do appreciate you. The links for today's show can be found at nonclinicalphysicians.com/mistakes-that-will-derail-a-job-search.

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Month One of the 12 Month Roadmap to a New Career – 269

John Jurica — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 12:30:26 +0000

Here Is Where We Start

Today we introduce the 12-Month Roadmap to a New Career.

The 12-month timeframe is an arbitrary one. It is possible to complete the process in as little as 4 or 6 months. However, employment contracts sometimes require 6 months' notice. And you will need to craft a resumé and build a LinkedIn profile. As a result, 12 months is a comfortable timetable for completing these challenges.

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.

12-Month Roadmap to a New Career

The Roadmap is divided into five phases. Each phase is used to perform specific duties that flow naturally over the 12-month timetable. And each phase has three to seven significant tasks that must be finished in that period. Oftentimes, they can be done concurrently.

Before getting started, there is a prerequisite. You must have already chosen two to three potential jobs to consider. This also assumes that the problem driving you away from traditional clinical practice cannot be solved by simply leaving your present department, switching to a different manager, or changing organizations.

In other words, you have already decided to leave traditional clinical practice.

What Happens in Month One?

The 1st month's steps include 4 tasks:

Revisit self-limiting beliefs and common myths that can slow your progress

Review self-limiting assumptions and common myths that might impede your progress. In order to move forward, you must overcome the self-limiting assumptions and widespread myths that emerge as we start to implement this life-changing event.

This topic was addressed in episode 252, “How to Kill the Myths About Alternative Jobs for Clinicians.” The most common misconceptions include these five:

there are a limited number of jobs available;
I'm not qualified for a nonclinical job, since all I know is medicine;
my income will decrease greatly;
I'm abandoning patients; and,
my reputation and position will suffer.

All of these have been shown to be false.

Review job descriptions

Do NOT wait until you're actually ready to apply for a job to look at job postings on websites like Indeed and LinkedIn. At this stage, it is important to understand the requirements of the jobs, and the language used in those positions.

Find a mentor

Episode 208, “How Do I Choose the Best Coaches Mentors and Masterminds for Me?” addresses this issue. Find a mentor for each industry that you are considering.

A mentor is someone who looks out for your best interests and is not typically paid. They are very familiar with the job you are pursuing and can help you avoid mistakes and accelerate your job search.

Join LinkedIn and create your initial profile

Complete your first profile right away. Updates can and will be made in the future. You don't necessarily want to tell your employer that you're seeking work if you're still employed. So, the initial version can be more general in scope.

And, by turning off notifications, when you start to post your interest in finding a new job, your current connections (including your employer) will NOT be notified.

Summary

The 12-Month Roadmap to a New Career is a model to teach how to make the transition from a practicing clinician to a nonclinical job. It helps to organize the steps into a logical sequence that is not overwhelming. In the model, during the first phase, there are 4 tasks to complete that will set the stage for a productive job search.

NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode.

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Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 269

Month One of the 12 Month Roadmap to a New Career

John: Welcome back to this week's show Nonclinical Nation. Today will be a slightly different type of episode. It's just me again, but this episode will be part of a series. The overarching theme of the series is this. The 12-month roadmap to a new career.

A couple of years ago, I put together a roadmap with all the steps that would take you from full-time clinical practice to becoming a chief medical officer of a hospital. And I structured it as a 12-month series of actions to take that would result in landing your first CMO job. On reflection, this roadmap can be generalized to cover the steps in landing any of dozens of nonclinical jobs, whether it's in pharma, consulting, insurance, or education, or in a health system.

The 12 months is also somewhat arbitrary. With effort, the process could be accomplished much quicker, but on the other hand, 12 months is a nice round number and it takes into account the need to give up to six months' notice that some employment contracts require. It might be 90 days, might be 120 days, or even six months to longer. That kind of fits in that 12-month timeframe.

Today, I'm not going to go through that entire roadmap, but I'm going to start with month one, and I'll be covering all four sub-goals in this important step at times referring to previous episodes in which we explored those topics in more detail. So, everything I've discussed, and I'm going to discuss today, really, I've discussed in other podcast episodes and sometimes in other videos and courses and so forth. But I'm going to put it all together in this series so that you can actually work along with the steps if you like.

Now, before we go any further though, let's thank our sponsor. The University of Tennessee offers the longest running and most highly respected physician only executive MBA in the country. It produced more than 700 graduates, and I've spoken with many of them.

The Haslam College of Business at the UT was ranked number one in the world by Economist Magazine as the most relevant executive MBA program. So, it's a very, very well-respected program. And unlike many others, this program only takes one year to complete. Since you'll complete a company project while working on your MBA, you'll demonstrate the value of the degree while you're still in the program.

Graduates have taken leadership positions at major healthcare organizations and have become entrepreneurs and business owners. So, if you want to acquire new business and management skills and advance your nonclinical career, then contact Dr. Kate Ashley's office by calling (865) 974-6526 or you can use our handy link at nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.

All right, let's get started with today's content. I put together a list of steps that can be spread out over six to 18 months that can be used to pursue and land your first nonclinical job. It's funny because a lot of the steps are exactly the same no matter what kind of job you're looking for. It's really a career transition model I guess is what you would call it. A little bit different from maybe starting your own business but even there, there's a lot of overlap. And so, I'll put a version of that roadmap in the show notes and also in my email that I send out announcing the posting of this episode. And so, that'll be available to look at, obviously, for those listening on the podcast, you don't really have something you can look at while you're driving or working out or what have you. Anyway, in the past, I've shared that slide. It was called Roadmap - 12 Months to a New Career. But going forward, I think I'm going to change that to the 12 Month Roadmap to a New Career. That's how I referred to it for this series and probably in future podcast episodes or even courses on my academy.

As constructed for the 12-month version, it is split up into five major blocks of time during which certain tasks are completed. And each of those steps, we'll call them, includes three to seven major assignments or tasks that need to be completed during that timeframe. And usually, they can be completed concurrently. In other words, you can work on one and work on another, kind of going back and forth, because some of them you need to give some time anyway to take breaks. And of course, you might also be working your full-time job during this time.

Now, there is a pre-condition for starting this process. So, this process, these 12 steps or this roadmap, it doesn't go all the way back to the very, very beginning where you're just contemplating something and you haven't really thought much about it. So, this starts when you've already selected two to three potential jobs to consider. And this assumes as simply leaving your current department, maybe getting a new manager or leaving your current organization is not the answer to whatever issue is pushing you to leave traditional clinical practice. Whether you are interested in doing something new, something different or you're burnt out or you're miserable, or you've decided to just leave the high-stress situation that you're in.

As in any model or construct like this one, some of the design is arbitrary. However, those items generally need to be done early and are placed in steps one or two, while the end results such as attending an interview or considering an offer are logically placed in step five. Note that step six is accepting an offer and starting a new job. So, that's not really a separate step, but it's included in the slide that I use to describe this.

Anyway, with that background, let me dig into what I place in step one, which can easily be accomplished in a month in most cases. The four tasks that I'm putting in step one include number one is revisit self-loading beliefs and common myths that might slow your progress. Number two, review job descriptions. Number three, find a mentor. And number four, join LinkedIn and create your initial complete profile. Let's go through each of those quickly here.

Task number one within that is revisit self-limiting beliefs and common myths that slow your progress.For you to go from just contemplating a change to actually deciding to move forward, you must have already overcome to some extent the usual self-limiting beliefs and common myths that occur in us as we begin to take on this rather immense life-changing event.

But the thing is, even if you've come to the conclusion, you want to move forward, what we found, myself and other coaches and consultants, is that these lingering self-limiting beliefs and myths will slow you down because you keep bumping up against them. They'll keep you from moving forward. Now this was addressed quite a bit in some detail in episode 252 called How to Kill the Myths about Alternative Jobs for Clinicians. But let me talk about these two somewhat separate issues of self-limiting beliefs and common myths and we'll just kind of spend a couple minutes on that.

Self-limiting beliefs, I kind of categorize the things that people say in their internal conversations with themselves. Things like, "I'm not good enough. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't want to look stupid. I don't want to look foolish." There are all kinds of these sorts of self-limiting internal beliefs and conversations that we have that a lot of people have spoken about. And I think I had an interview with Dr. Maiysha Clairborne to talk about some of these.

Now, they're not to me the biggest issues because we were able to obviously overcome those when we decided to enter medical school, to excel in college, to choose a residency. And some of us went to some very competitive residencies and to persevere through three to five years of residency and fellowship or more if we did that. So, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that, but you need to do some reflection and see if you really buy any of those things. Most physicians are relatively confident in their abilities. It's really the second part of these myths that hold us back because in a sense, they're logical, sort of arguments against moving forward. And so, I want to address the five most common myths. Again, I spoke about those in episode 252, and there'll be a link down in the show notes for this.

But the first myth is that there's a limited number of jobs available. Again, as I've discussed before, there are at least nine major industries that hire thousands of physicians. It's reflected in the fact that the jobs typically are things like physician advisor, medical director, and chief medical officer. Those are jobs that only physicians can do. Those are kept a big secret that is kept from us when we're in medical school and residency because most of our teachers don't want us to be siphoned off into those nonclinical jobs.

But the reality is that there are thousands and thousands of jobs out there just waiting for us, and on any given day, there are thousands that are open. You could find, I can guarantee you that if you start looking at job descriptions, which we'll talk about in a minute, you'll see thousands of them there. So that's number one. You have to get past that myth.

The second myth is that all you know is medicine and that you're not really qualified for other jobs. But again, I just described the fact that the prerequisite, the core prerequisite for doing 99% of these jobs is that you're a physician. Many of these jobs are open to physicians that don't have residency training or don't even have a license, but the fact that you're a physician is the core or central part that's needed.

Now, sometimes there are other skills that you need. Most of those can be usually learned on the job, or sometimes you can get a little extra training or certification or attend a course or something like that, and you'll be ready for those jobs. So, medicine is a very large, huge knowledge base. It includes so many different sciences, statistics, and epidemiology, not to mention how to work in teams, how to teach, and how to do presentations. There are so many skills you have, and you're so attractive as an employee because you're so reliable. Presenteeism is not an issue as opposed to absenteeism. Your focus, your ability to get the job done are just so great that you're a great employee anyway. And of course, even if you're going to do something if you're not employed, but you're self-employed, those skills all come in handy.

The third big myth is that your income is going to suffer significantly. Usually, when I'm addressing that, I talk about two things. Number one, you've got to compare apples and oranges. You cannot compare the fact that you're making $600,000 a year as some kind of surgeon or interventional cardiologist. Take into account, at least to some extent that to do that, most of the time you're being on call every third or fourth day, you're coming in at all hours, you're working 70 hours a week, more or less. And so, you've got to compare that to these other jobs where you're typically working 40 to 50 hours a week at the most. And also, the other jobs have to pay at least a basic salary of around $200,000 or more. They're not going to get physicians to do those jobs.

And the job growth and the salary growth is very rapid in some of those jobs. For example, most chief medical officers and hospitals make over $400,000 a year at this point. So, they're not low-paying jobs for the most part. If you're a freelance medical writer and you're only writing 10 hours a week, you're not going to make a lot of money. But there are medical writers and editors that make $200,000 and more a year as is right now.

All right, the other two myths. "I'm abandoning my patients." Just think of this. What job is it that you can create a new device or a new drug, bring it to market, demonstrate its safety that can save thousands of lives? Obviously, a pharma job. What job enables you to identify and reduce errors and improve the quality of care in a hospital? CMO jobs, medical director jobs. I saved more lives as a chief medical officer than I did seeing patients, most of which had really trivial illnesses or chronic illnesses that I had little impact on.

Most jobs that you do nonclinical have a very positive impact on populations of patients. And usually, it's many more patients than you could ever interact with and impact significantly one on one.

And then the issue of your stature and or reputation being diminished, that you're no longer a doctor. Everyone I've ever met who's done a nonclinical job is still called a doctor, still recognized as a physician. And part of that is because the jobs I talk about are those that involve building on your medical background. In other words, you're not just going to become, let's say, an attorney who doesn't work with malpractice cases or a business owner in something that has nothing to do with healthcare. Most everything we talk about here, our jobs in which it's part of your background as a physician, that is the reason you move into these new positions, which are usually a lot more pleasant, less stress, no liability. That's another thing that should be compared in terms of the cost.

And so, keep that in mind. Your reputation is intact. In fact, when I went from being just one family physician in a hospital with 300 or 400 physicians on staff to the chief medical officer, if anything, my stature and reputation improved significantly, and it's true of very many other jobs.

The first task is the self-limiting beliefs and myths. You have to keep reminding yourselves of these things as you go down this path to the roadmap to a new career. The second one I listed is reviewing job descriptions. Now, that might not be intuitive in the sense that usually you don't have to start actually looking at job descriptions, job postings on websites in Indeed, in LinkedIn and elsewhere, until you're actually getting ready to apply for a job.

However, we need to keep in mind what Stephen Covey mentioned many years ago, that when we're doing something, running a business, starting something, have a goal, we need to start with the end in mind. So, there are things that are peculiar to different types of jobs that you might not come to realize unless you actually start looking at job descriptions. Now, granted, a job description is only so long. It doesn't always tell you exactly what each job is going to entail. There might be things hidden, but there are going to be things in a job posting that you might have never thought of, even if you've done your research on a job.

Suffice it to say that you might think you know what an MSL - medical science liaison - does because you've read about it in an article or in a book or something. But you might look at the job description and go, "Oh, I didn't realize that's what I need to do or I didn't know that this was the jargon that we would use in this job."

And again, whether that's for working in pharmacovigilance in a pharma company or becoming a hospital medical director, or chief medical officer, or you're going to do something in an insurance company. As you go through those, you learn the language that's being spoken at least by the recruiters, and most likely also by the CEO or the people that are hiring you for a position for that particular industry. So, you want to start scanning through those. Again, you've already decided on two or three or four different industries you might be looking at a job in. So, you want to start scanning through those. And if you see something pop up like 50% of the time you're going to be traveling and you wanted to do something closer to home, that's going to tell you "This really isn't a job for me."

And there's lots of little things that can come up in those job descriptions that you might not have thought of. Again, this is just something to do with the beginning. Take a few notes, and keep them in mind. You will circle back to the job descriptions and the job postings later when you're getting serious about actually applying to a particular job.

And the other thing is, when you look at those things besides the factors that might exclude you from considering it, there might be some positive things that would tend to attract you to the job. But the other thing is they'll mention things where, okay, maybe there is some training, or maybe I should take a course or try to get some kind of experience. They'll list the type of experience they're expecting.

A lot of times for a management position for a physician, they have certain specific experiences they like you to have had. Like maybe you've looked at a P&L or other financial reports. Maybe you understand the difference between cash accounting and accrual accounting, and that you can learn from reading an article. You don't have to have a degree for that or get an MBA, but sometimes you might want to get a certification, and the certifications can sometimes be accomplished by reading something and taking an exam or maybe attending a few weeks of courses. And then taking an exam doesn't mean you're going back to college for a year or two part-time or full-time. It can be lots of little things that would give you a little edge over other people. So, that's the other reason for looking through those.

The third thing in this category, in this first major step is to find a mentor. I've talked about finding a mentor before several times. Episode 208, "How Do I Choose the Best Coaches Mentors and Masterminds for Me?" is one episode in which I discussed it. There are some others. And you can have more than one mentor. So that's one thing. If you have in mind two or three different industries that you're still toying with at this point early in the process, then get a mentor for each.

Sometimes I bring this other issue up. It's kind of like having a mentor and that's being able to shadow. It's really not that easy. And in a lot of nonclinical jobs, for heaven's sake, if you have a mentor and someone who could take you around showing them the job they're doing, that you're thinking about getting, shadowing for a day can be super helpful. You're not really going to be there to learn the skills or the techniques you would use in the job. Just to be exposed to make sure you understand that it's the type of thing you'd like to do.

So, find a mentor or two or three. I'll remind you that a mentor is someone that generally is looking out for your best interest, somebody who is not being paid generally. I distinguish a mentor from a coach, although there is some overlap there. But heck, if you're going into these jobs, you should be able to get somebody that you can talk to informally on a somewhat infrequent basis and just ask a single question or two. You're not trying to monopolize your time for two hours once a month to teach you everything you need to know about this job.

I had someone that I met through the medical society, the Illinois State Medical Society, who was working as a surveyor for CME like I was. And lo and behold, I didn't know what job he was doing. I just knew he wasn't seeing patients anymore. It turned out he was a chief medical officer for one of the largest stand-alone hospitals in the state of Illinois. I didn't even know what a CMO was. I'd never heard the term.

So, he became my mentor, and I'd meet with him informally three or four times a year at a meeting where we were doing something else, or maybe call him once in a great while, and that was it. But he gave me enough information and encouragement and support that I actually pursued that job as chief medical officer.

The fourth task in this Step One that we're talking about today is to join LinkedIn and create your first complete profile. Or if you already have a LinkedIn profile or LinkedIn page, it's a good chance it's not complete. And if it's not, then just go ahead and complete your first profile.

Now keep in mind, it's going to be sitting there. It doesn't have to be spectacular, and it can and will be updated later. In fact, you want to keep it kind of general because you haven't decided specifically which job you're going to apply for.

Once you get down to step five and you're applying for your job and you're completing your resume, then you want to tweak your LinkedIn to be much more specific. The other reason for that is if you're still employed, you don't necessarily want to let your employer know that you're looking for a job.

That would not be the first thing I'd put on the very top of my LinkedIn profile. I would tend to complete all the sections that LinkedIn asks you to complete, but you can just complete them with the information of what you're doing now and maybe some interests you have that are potentially pertinent to your new job, but you could put those down more as a hobby or an interest. So, keep that in mind, but those can always be updated.

The other thing is, if you're going to do this update from time to time, which you will as you get closer to the end of that process, you can turn off the notifications if you like, which means that when you add something like "I am now looking for a job in the pharma industry", you can make it so that your connections, your followers don't get a notice that you've made a change. The default, I think, in LinkedIn is still that anytime you make a change, that's a trigger for someone to get an update. Like, "Oh, John Jurica just updated his profile. He's now doing X, Y, and Z." You can turn that off so it's there if someone's looking for it actively or if you send them to your profile. But your friends and family and your boss and your coworkers won't be notified when you add those kinds of things to LinkedIn.

Those are four good things to work on in the first month of this 12-month roadmap to a new career. That's plenty to work on. And if something bleeds into the second step, that's fine too. It's like a Gantt chart where you're working on multiple things at the same time, and there can be overlap from step to step.

But you should have a few mentors. You should get that LinkedIn profile going. You should start looking at job descriptions, in my opinion, to help kind of hone your further research. And then you should make sure you still aren't being held back by some of the internal self-talk that goes on in terms of your limiting beliefs and or the common myths about nonclinical career transition.

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The post Month One of the 12 Month Roadmap to a New Career – 269 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

How to Land An Awesome Job Using LinkedIn – 232

John Jurica — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 17:47:30 +0000

Interview with Dr. Heather Fork

Dr. Heather Fork makes her third appearance on the Podcast in today’s interview with an important message about using LinkedIn.

Heather is an ICF master certified coach. She helps physicians find their best career path forward, whether in medicine, a nonclinical career, or something else.

In 2010 she founded the Doctor’s Crossing. Since that time, she has helped hundreds of physicians find greater career fulfillment and meaning in their work.

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.

New Podcast

She hosts the weekly Doctor’s Crossing Carpe Diem Podcast. And she is passionate about creating new resources to make it easier for physicians to navigate their careers.

She previously described her Resumé Writing Kit here on the PNC Podcast.

Using LinkedIn

The biggest mistake physicians make is not getting in the parade and having fun. – Dr. Heather Fork

Summary

Dr. Heather Fork explains why LinkedIn is important, and how to use it in your professional life. She also explained the most critical functions to utilize and points out little-known tips when using it, including her “Alumni Hack.” She has created her own “how-to” course called LinkedIn for Physicians that anybody can purchase if they need help setting it up.

NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode.

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Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 232

How to Land An Awesome Job Using LinkedIn

John: I'm very pleased to bring today's guest back to the podcast for the third time. She's been an awesome source of support for physicians struggling with their careers for many years and she's a very well-known ICF Master Certified Coach in resume and LinkedIn expert. Hello, Dr. Heather Fork.

Dr. Heather Fork: Hello, iconic Dr. John Jurica. Thank you so much for that very generous intro. And I have to say, I am a huge fan of yours. Yours is probably the first podcast I ever listened to.

John: Well, I'm happy to hear that and I'm glad to hear it. And it's mutual because I love your podcast. Oops. I shouldn't have spilled the beans that you have a podcast. That's one of the new things you're doing. But I love your podcast, I love your coaching, and your blog too has much good stuff on it. We're not going to go over all your past history because they can go back and listen to the previous episodes if they like. What I really want to know is since it's been about a year and a half, what new things have you been up to?

Dr. Heather Fork: Well, spoiler. A podcast.

John: There you go.

Dr. Heather Fork: Now, you inspired me with this medium that I've been putting off. And when I heard you and then Amy Porterfield, I thought this is so valuable. Especially since I don't really like to write and I've been blogging for 10 years, I just had to do something different.

The podcast started last October. And as you know, it's a lot of work to do a weekly podcast, but it's much fun and I love getting my former clients to come on and other guests because they're so fantastic. And what I hear from listeners is I don't feel alone anymore. Someone else feels the way I do. I don't feel like I'm damaged goods and I have hope.

John: Yeah. Well, it's been a while since I started, but one of the things I realized shortly after I started and I heard from people is that you are part of people's life. They know your voice. I was at a meeting once and someone came up to me and said, "Hey, I recognize you. Aren't you John Jurica?" We were at a meeting about nonclinical careers. But just that whole idea that you're talking to them directly.

Dr. Heather Fork: Yes, it's intimate. And I love it because you can really help people feel too what you're expressing and what the guests are expressing. I think it really changes the landscape from being something to just thinking about making changes, to feeling like it's really possible. That these people are really alive. Someone just didn't write a bunch of stuff and put it on a paper and made it up.

John: That's true. Now, oddly enough, there are some people that have never listened to a single podcast. I don't know how we get to them. But for those who are listening and want to learn about nonclinical careers or burnout or nontraditional careers or just, I don't know, feeling better about your life, definitely, you want to listen to Doctor's Crossing Carpe Diem podcast. Why did you pick that name?

Dr. Heather Fork: I just love the term "carpe diem". And my coaching program is called Carpe Diem because like Robin William said in that movie, "Dead Poets Society" that, "Before long we're going to be pushing up daisy's unless we carpe that diem." And we got on this path and our whole life has been planned out for us. And if we don't really question, is it what we really want to be doing? Is it making us happy? We'll be pushing up daisy's and saying, "Oh my God, I didn't get to have the life I wanted."

John: For sure. Yeah. Seize the day, right?

Dr. Heather Fork: Yes.

John: All right. Everyone's going to go listen to your podcast, but that is not really the main reason I wanted you to come on today because we discussed something a few years ago about creating different resources for people that we could share with our followers and our listeners and all that.

And then I saw that you, the expert in LinkedIn, recently created a course. But I'm going to just talk to you about LinkedIn. That's what we're going to spend the next 20 minutes doing, because I don't think that our listeners always understand the importance or why we should learn about it if we're not already using it. Just explain what LinkedIn is for those that have never used it, or have just dabbled a little bit and maybe why it's different from other social media sites.

Dr. Heather Fork: I'd love to. LinkedIn is considered the number one networking platform for professionals, and it has over 800 million members. So, it's worldwide. And I'd say the main thing about it, that's different from Facebook and Instagram and these other platforms is that it's really for those of you who want to have a professional platform, you can have your own profile, who want to network with other professionals with a really powerful search engine. I call it the Rolodex on Steroids. And also, be able to use your profile to apply for jobs and interact with recruiters. It's one-stop shopping and a platform that's continuing to evolve.

John: Well, I'm on LinkedIn fairly often. It's actually one way that I find podcast guests, for example. And being an introvert, I'm not a big networker per se, but it's an awesome way to network as is a podcast, of course.

But the thing is, I have never seen a nasty conversation on LinkedIn. People are like, they don't want to go to Twitter and Facebook because it's just loaded with sometimes some nasty stuff. And LinkedIn is, like you said, it's professional. It's a place where you can find jobs and post jobs, if you like. Does it come into play a lot in terms of the people you work with, that you coach or that you're teaching? I know you've done some speaking about LinkedIn. Does it seem to help them? And how often does it become a critical part of their career search?

Dr. Heather Fork: That's a great question, John. And I would say back in 2010 when I first started, LinkedIn was there, but it wasn't used as much. But now all of my clients use LinkedIn. And let me explain how it's helpful by painting a little scenario. Let's say we have two physicians and they're both applying for the same nonclinical job. One is on LinkedIn, one isn't. The one who isn't on LinkedIn applies through the regular channel, say maybe Indeed with their CV or resume. Then the other physician applies on LinkedIn. And the difference is when the recruiter gets a CV for that first physician, they just have the CV or resume. They don't see a picture. They don't see recommendations. They don't have this dynamic visual of the physician.

Then if they go to the physician who applied through LinkedIn or even has a link for their LinkedIn profile on their resume, that recruiter can click and then they already see this beautiful face. They see a lovely banner photo and then everything's right there that they need that would've been on the resume. Plus, there are a lot of additional things you can put on your LinkedIn profile. They might read a recommendation that describes exactly who they're looking for. That's not going to be on your resume.

John: Absolutely. Yeah. In my mind, I think about a Venn diagram, things overlap and a resume and LinkedIn overlap a lot, and then networking overlaps with your LinkedIn. And you're right. The LinkedIn profile is just so much more complete. Not that you want to send in a five-page resume. But if someone wants to look for that information, it's right there on LinkedIn.

Dr. Heather Fork: Exactly. So, the physician who's using LinkedIn, when they want to apply for a certain job, they could find a physician who's working in that company, and they can reach out to them for an informational interview. And then often those physicians get a finder's fee if they refer somebody who gets hired. So, there's an incentive for them to talk to you. If that person's applying and they were recommended by another physician, the recruiter already likes them because there's a much higher success rate for candidates found that way. It makes it easier. So, you can see how very quickly that physician who's on LinkedIn already has many advantages.

John: I had a podcast guest tell me once that submitting a CV on a website is the way of madness. She had literally said she had submitted a thousand resumes and had never received a response. And she noted that once she figured out that she just needed to have some connection with somebody, either find out who the hiring manager was or have somebody that she knows in the company, some touchpoint, then she had some actual jobs that were requesting she come and interview.

Dr. Heather Fork: Oh my gosh, that's such a discouraging story to send out thousands and not hear anything back. I'm surprised she persisted that long.

John: Well, I think it's misleading because it's just so easy. Oh, I'm just going to cut and paste and cut and paste and cut and paste. But no one's looking at those kinds of resumes, I don't think. My daughter is a recruiter for a big firm and they use LinkedIn constantly.

Dr. Heather Fork: Well, it's really becoming the go-to platform for recruiters. And when you apply for a job on LinkedIn, often, you'll actually see the recruiter that's connected to that position and you can reach out to them. You can attach your resume right there in addition to the formal application process. You can start a relationship. You could also just look at jobs you're interested in and you may not be ready to apply, but you can connect with that recruiter and say, "Hey, I'm not ready yet, but I'd love to establish a relationship with you."

John: Yeah, absolutely. That's so true. You mentioned how all of your clients use LinkedIn. Can you give us some examples of where it was very critical to a particular, without naming names, particular clients?

Dr. Heather Fork: Sure. Absolutely. I have some great stories. I had one client who wanted to transition into a certain nonclinical area. And we were on the phone together and we were both searching on LinkedIn. And because she wasn't having a lot of success at first, connecting with a couple of folks on LinkedIn. So, I said, "Here, let's find somebody." I found this person with her same specialty, and she sent him a message. She heard from him the next day. They had a chat. It turns out they knew a couple of people in common who were working at that company as well. She ended up getting an interview and it took a while because they didn't quite have an opening then for her specialty, but she got the job and she's working in the job and she's really happy.

John: Very nice.

Dr. Heather Fork: I have another story. This was a physician who was brand new to LinkedIn. When she came to me, she didn't have a profile or anything. She created it. It really doesn't take that long when you just follow the steps. And I taught her my alumni hack, which is one of my favorite little things to do on LinkedIn that's very powerful, is to search your alumni network. That could be people you went to college with, med school, even your training program, and see if they're working in the industry or at the company that you're interested in.

She found someone who went to her small liberal arts college who was working in the company where she wanted to work. She messaged him, he got back to her right away, and said, "Send me a resume. I want to give it to the hiring manager." She did that. The hiring manager reaches out, interviews within a week. Does another interview, gets the job. There was one and done. One application, a couple of interviews, got the job.

John: It's amazing. I think sometimes we feel like if we're reaching out to someone, we haven't seen in 20 years, they're not going to respond. But the reality is when I'm on the receiving end, if I get a note of any sort, whether it's an email or LinkedIn and they're from my Alma mater. I mean, invariably, I respond immediately. That's just human nature, I think.

Dr. Heather Fork: You are family, and those little connections are huge. It's funny how we're like that. The first time we had gone to the school, like I said, 20 years ago or before you, or after you, but you are buddies.

John: Yeah. Even if it's someone from two or three years, if you're at the same school, you just have that bond and can talk about the different things and you feel like you're somehow you owe that person for some reason in a good way.

Dr. Heather Fork: Yeah. You just feel this common connection. That really it feels like a blood brother or something.

John: Now, I hear another thing people tell me about LinkedIn is they create a profile and they should put certain keywords if they're looking to be found by someone. Is that a big thing? Is that a minor thing to consider?

Dr. Heather Fork: That's a great question, John. Now, there's something on LinkedIn called "Your headline". And this is what comes below your name, or you have your degrees and everything. And by default, LinkedIn puts in the company where you're working and your job title. That's just by default. But you can customize this headline with keywords that will help recruiters find you or the people you want to find you. For example, it might just say that you're a physician at Slippery Rock Clinic, or something like that. But you can put in, medical writer, consultant, physician advisor, you can put in expert witness, the side gigs that you might be doing. Even you can say, "Seeking position in drug safety".

John: Wow. Nice. That helps really to key off those who are actually looking on LinkedIn for someone to contact like a recruiter or something like that.

Dr. Heather Fork: You can do that. And then those keywords also are important to have in your "About section", which is like your customized bio. They can also go in your "Experience section". They can go anywhere on your profile and they are searchable.

John: That really helps. I'm telling you. Let me turn it around now. Here's the way I like to look at things sometimes is like, let's look at the other side of the coin. What are the mistakes? Now, we've kind of alluded to them in a way by what a good way to use LinkedIn is. But have you seen working with people and said, "Wait a second, this is why people aren't looking at your profile?" Any common mistakes that we make when we first start to use LinkedIn?

Dr. Heather Fork: I would say there definitely are mistakes like that, of not optimizing the profile. And there are lots of ways to do that. But some of the biggest mistakes are really just not getting in the parade and then shutting the parade down too soon. What do I mean by that? Not getting in the parade is saying, well, I'm a private person. I really don't like to put myself out there, or I'm really introverted. I don't like to network. Or you get on LinkedIn, you put up a basic profile. Maybe you send a few messages, apply for a few jobs, nothing happens. And you just say, well, this doesn't work and I don't have time. Which I completely understand. It is not the most intuitive platform. And these things that I teach in the course help you know how to use it and use it strategically so it's not wasting your time.

John: Okay. Now you mentioned the course. I mentioned it earlier and I do want to learn more about the course. I do want to remind my listeners though, of course of your website, doctorscrossing.com. That's where pretty much they can find everything. Now I understand also, you have a page there that has a bunch of free resources. That looked pretty awesome. Can you tell us about that first?

Dr. Heather Fork: Absolutely. On my website, under the freebie tab, there are these downloadable PDFs that you can have. One is a starter kit that's very extensive on how you can go from being overwhelmed at the crossroad to figuring out how to move forward. That has a lot of great information for your career process. Then there's one on medical writing. There's one on pharma. There's a chart review. There might be some others there. I can't quite remember, but you can go to the freebie tab and take whatever you want.

John: I went and looked today. I think there were at least six that were there and they address different things. I've downloaded several of them, of course, but I would recommend people to go. And you can go directly there at doctorscrossing.com/freeresources, or just go to the website and look for it.

Okay. Now you have a LinkedIn course. This is something that I have been looking forward to for a long time. One of those things that I thought we really needed. I have this little video that I made five years ago where I built a LinkedIn profile. It is so dated. It is so ugly. And then I just said, "I'm not going to do anything, because I'm waiting for Heather to come out with her course." So, it's called what? LinkedIn course for physicians?

Dr. Heather Fork: You always do quality work and you're also incredibly prolific. You put about a hundred things to my one.

John: Okay. I'm not going to argue with you except that this course is beautiful. I will say that it's a lot prettier than anything I've produced. It's just awesome. Tell us about how it's structured and what does it go through?

Dr. Heather Fork: Thanks for asking. And I have to say, this has been the hardest thing I've done in my business. It took me a year. It wouldn't take me that long if I was doing the second one, but the course is three hours of video that's broken down into 22 short lessons, five minutes to 10 minutes. And what it does is it walks you through creating your profile, then teaches you how to start networking and message people. There are specific examples and templates to use of, "Well, what do you say in that message when you only have 300 characters? What do you do when someone doesn't respond to that message, and then how do you write longer messages"? We cover networking and then we go on to "How to start searching for jobs?" Because that's another thing that really gets people in a twist is, "I see all these job descriptions and they want five to seven years and I'm not qualified" and that's another area of difficulty. I really talk about that.

And then I also show them how to apply for jobs and work with recruiters. And there's all these little things you don't really know about. For example, did you know, John, that you can put yourself in anonymous mode when you want to go look at people's profile, but you don't want them to see that you've been visiting them and then you can turn it back on and be visible?

John: No, no, I've never tried that, but it would be definitely a useful tool.

Dr. Heather Fork: It really is. You can stalk a bit on LinkedIn.

John: One of the things that I did find out though is if you have a profile and you want to make a change to it and you don't want your boss to be notified of the change, you can go in and turn that off temporarily or permanently where they won't be notified of new changes. You can be a little under the radar that way.

Dr. Heather Fork: Yes, that's 100% correct. You can stop those notifications to your contacts. A couple of other things about the course is that I really wanted to make it easy to use. With each lesson, there's a downloadable cheat sheet that goes over all the steps, and in the videos, I'll teach about how to do something. For example, how to write your "About section". And then I'll go on LinkedIn in the video and show them exactly how to do it, where to click, where to go, and then show examples of other physicians about sections.

My goal was to take the frustration out, make it doable. And I love people now responding to me saying, "Oh, the course was really easy to use. I'm really happy with my profile now," and they'll send me their profile. And it's so fun to see how great they look.

John: It's good to have someone who really understands how something like this is used telling you and teaching you about it because I've been using LinkedIn for a long time. And I was just in your course a couple of days ago and there was a whole section. I was like, "Oh, I could probably really get my connections up quite a bit using this technique that you described". Which is again, reaching out to alumni or other ways of networking. And then, there's different ways that you can connect. There are some with a message, without a message. And I just really was really impressed and I'm definitely going to go back and go through that section. Especially when I'm looking for a new podcast guest.

Dr. Heather Fork: Well, thank you. And that was my goal to just make it easy because we don't have extra time to waste and I don't want people to get frustrated and then give up.

John: No, absolutely. And it can be frustrating until you really get a feel for it. Well, there are different ways that they can access this course. They can get it from your website, but I happen to be an affiliate. I have a link for it. And the only reason the listeners might want to buy it through my link is that they also get a free bundle of courses from my nonclinical career academy worth a couple of hundred dollars.

I'll put my link for them to look at, nonclinicalphysicians.com/linkedincourse. And I'll probably put that actually on my website at some point permanently if you'll let me, but that's an easy way to go. If they happen to be at your website, they're going to obviously sign up there. You've got some other resources there as well. So, anything else you want to tell us about the LinkedIn course before we move on off that topic?

Dr. Heather Fork: Before I say anything else about the course, I do want to say, please get it from John because he's so wonderful. He works so hard and I'd really like to support him. Please feel free to use his link. And if you come to my site, and you forgot his, just email me and I'll send it to you. I want you to support him, but thank you for all you do for me.

About the course and LinkedIn in general, I would just like to say that if you feel that this is not what you're naturally good at, networking or putting yourself out there, just let go of that. Because a lot of my clients are introverted. They had the same feelings about LinkedIn. They would drop their shoulders and just feel like, "Ugh, do I really have to, Heather?"

But once they get on there and do things such as usually the alumni hack and they get someone to respond to them, they're really happy. It's a game-changer. And all of a sudden, they see that being on LinkedIn is like treasure hunting. We don't have to call it networking. Let's just call it treasure hunting because you do find these treasures of people who will definitely help you out and open doors.

John: Yeah, that's so true. That's so true. Maybe I'll make you step back even further, just in considering all the clients that you've known over the years and the people you're helping now, any other advice you have for physicians who just right now happen to be just kind of frustrated with the whole process of thinking about doing a side gig or trying to overcome burnout or anything like that?

Dr. Heather Fork: Yes. Yes. And if I can go back to my parade metaphor.

John: Sure.

Dr. Heather Fork: I would say, just get in the parade. Don't sit on the sidelines and watch other people's floats go by and say, "Oh, well, look what they're doing. Why can't that be me? They probably just knew somebody or that's not going to happen to me." I say, get in the parade, start building your float. And when you're building your float for the parade, you start with your platform. And you don't have to know where the parade is going. Just start with your profile or just start thinking about what you want to do, what's working, what's not working. Build your platform.

And then when you're actually on your float and riding in the parade, have fun. Don't look around at other people's floats and say, "Oh, theirs is better than mine. I'll never be like them." Cheer them on, dance on your platform, and have fun because it's not about getting to the end of the parade, we're all going to get there, but we want to be enjoying the parade while it's happening, which it's your life. I'm there standing on the sidelines cheering you on. Get in there so I can wave my pom-poms for you.

John: That is so cool, Heather. It is. And listeners can get a sense if they haven't read your blog or listened to your podcast, they're going to get more of what you just heard. That's a good thing. Let's go over that again.

The podcast is the Doctor's Crossing Carpe Diem podcast. They're going to find that on any app, Spotify, Apple, whatever. Definitely listen to that, go to doctorscrossing.com, and look for those free resources. And if you want to learn more about the course, go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/linkedincourse, and you'll have a page there where you can learn more about it. I think we've covered everything I wanted to cover today, Heather. This has been fantastic and fun. I'm always happy to be able to spend a few minutes talking to you.

Dr. Heather Fork: It's such an honor, John. I'm a huge fan of yours. And can I put a plugin for your new script app that you have?

John: Yes.

Dr. Heather Fork: I love all the things John does. If you haven't heard about his new script app is a community where you can join very, very affordably and get a lot of wonderful content, access to his courses, access to mentors. John, you can let people know the price and how they find it. But I think it's something to really look into.

John: Yeah. The nice thing about it too is it's not limited to physicians. And so, most of us work in teams, whether clinically or nonclinically. It's actually designed for any healthcare licensed professionals, psychologists, social workers, PAs, MPs, oral surgeons, and doctors. It's like less than $5 a month. It's newscript.app. I appreciate you bringing that up today, Heather.

Dr. Heather Fork: Yeah. How can you not? $5 Starbucks, miss that for one day, get the new script app and you'll be doing a jig.

John: Absolutely. All right, Heather. Well, thank you much. I guess we're at the end of our time now, I'm going to say goodbye and I hope to see you again soon and back on the podcast sometime.

Dr. Heather Fork: Thank you, John. I really appreciate you having me on.

John: You're welcome. Bye-bye.

Dr. Heather Fork: Bye-bye.

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The post How to Land An Awesome Job Using LinkedIn – 232 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

Follow These Steps to Create an Awesome LinkedIn Profile – 009

Elizabeth Rink — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 12:30:50 +0000

In this episode, I'll be walking you through the steps to create an awesome LinkedIn profile, as was promised in Episode #8.

But first, I’m going provide a quick book review.

Book Review

I recently picked up a copy of Do You Feel Like You Wasted All That Training?: Questions from Doctors Considering a Career Change.

Written by Michael J. McLaughlin, and published in 2007, it provides answers to dozens of questions regarding the author's transition from clinician to full-time career in medical communications.

At first, I was put off by the Q and A approach, but McLaughlin did an excellent job making his story engaging and full of great advice. He approached his transition very methodically. And he outlines a 5-step process that many of us should emulate.

McLaughlin was so inspired and passionate about this topic that he founded the Physician Renaissance Network (PRN) in 2004. Here is what it says about PRN on his LinkedIn page: PRN is “the most comprehensive resource created for doctors with non-clinical careers and interests. Key topic areas include career change, non-clinical career development, consulting, and entrepreneurism. PRN focuses on education, career evolution, and networking opportunities, encouraging an open exchange of experiences and ideas.”

In the book he explains how he overcame his fears of leaving clinical medicine, his very practical approach to career transition, and the importance of networking to his journey. He also spends some time explaining the attraction of his chosen career in the field of Medical Communications.

I definitely encourage you to get a copy if you’re serious about career change. You'll find inspiration and practical advice.

Steps to Create an Awesome LinkedIn Profile

Here are the steps to creating your first profile. The way LinkedIn is set up, once you get started, you can go in many different directions. But the outline that follows will help you to hit all of the important steps for a complete profile. But you can return later and continue to build on this foundation.

I've also created a video with the steps that can be found at Click Me!

As you prepare to create a LinkedIn account and complete your profile, it will help to have a copy of your resume so that you don’t have to dig up old diplomas and beginning and end dates for your work and educational history.

Also, you’ll need a professional-looking portrait to upload. This is MANDATORY, because some potential connections and recruiters won’t even look at a profile without a photo.

Step-by-Step

Here are the steps to follow:

Go to LinkedIn.com.
Click SIGN-UP.
Enter Name, County, Zip Code.
Answer Question “Are You a Student?”
Enter Job Title and Company and Industry.
When asked, answer the question “What are you most interested in?”
- Staying up to date in my industry
- Building my professional network
- Keeping in touch with my contacts
- Finding a job (I'd select this)
- Not sure yet
Go to your email account to get and enter the confirmation code.
Click on link to bring you back to your account, if necessary.
Click on the “Me” Icon at the top of the page.
- Under ACCOUNT select Settings & Privacy – complete every item in this list that you can – you probably don’t need Premium Services yet.
- You’ll notice that the Help Section is available here under ACCOUNT. The Language has probably already been chosen under Settings & Privacy. Below this, still in the “Me” Section you will see MANAGE Posts & Activity, and Job Postings.
Click on Job Postings, enter your email and password and look around. You can come back to this section later after completing your Profile.
Now Click on the Me Icon and select View Profile.
- Here you will see your Name, Title, Company Name and Location that you provided when you signed up. Notice that LinkedIn provides feedback on the strength of your Profile to encourage you to provide more details and complete more sections. The goal is to make this as complete as possible.
- In this Profile View you will add work dates, which is just your work history, and you should add your current and previous 3 to 5 jobs
Click Next and add your Educational History, going back to the college or university you attended.
Click Next and import the photo/portrait that was mentioned earlier, if you did not already do so earlier in the process.
Click Next and add Skills – these are selected by you, but will be endorsed by others.
Click Next and complete your Summary. This is one of the most important sections: it tells a story that might include your personal mission, values, vision, background and career goals. It should include key words that might be found in the jobs offers you are trying to attract. I structured mine by completing the following sub-headings:
- WHAT I DO…
- WHO I SERVE…
- WHAT MAKES ME DIFFERENT…
  This section allows you to add media – so if you have a link to a blog or podcast, you can add it here as I have.

As you build yours over time, LinkedIn will remind you to add certain components that it considers incomplete.

My LinkedIn Profile

My profile isn’t perfect, but I've tried to make it as complete as possible. LinkedIn says that my profile is complete. You can look it over by going to https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-jurica/

All of this material can be updated at any time. You’ll want to go back into your Settings and decide whether you want your Network or the Public to be notified every time there is a change to your Profile. I choose not to do so, because there are times when I make minor changes and I didn’t want my Followers and Connections being notified of every little change.

On the other hand, if you start a new job and just added it to your profile, you might want people to know about that, so you should change the setting before doing your update. Just be sure to thoroughly review it, recheck for typos, and even read it out loud to make sure it sounds grammatically correct and professional before releasing it.

At this point you'll have a very complete and effective profile, probably in the top 25% of all profiles.

Further Improvements

Over time, you can devote some effort to improving it even further. Here is a list of some additional tactics you can follow to improve your profile even further:

Add a background image
Create a great headline rather than the standard job title
Remember to include appropriate key words in your summary – especially the ones you see in the job descriptions that apply to you
Add media, like press releases and even videos if you can, to highlight the Experience section
Try to highlight all of your skills, then endorse others because they will generally return teh favor and endorse you
Follow companies that might have pertinent jobs because some companies monitor their LinkedIn followers
Don’t forget to join appropriate groups when you have a chance
Consider a Premium membership, at least temporarily, if you want to be able to reach out and use InMail to directly message second-degree connections

Well, that’s how you do it. When I first developed my profile a few years ago, I found several free Kindle books that provided additional details so you might search Amazon for additional advice.

I have created a video for those of you that prefer video to written instructions. Check out my first attempt at using screen capture software to walk you through the process of creating your first LinkedIn profile.

Check out the step-by-step video: Click Me!

I want to thank you so much for joining me today.

If you’ve enjoyed the podcast please tell your friends to check it out and Subscribe on iTunes.

Let's end with a quote:

Until next time – Take Care.

Here is the list of resources mentioned in this episode:

Right click here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.

The easiest ways to listen: vitalpe.net/itunes or vitalpe.net/stitcher

If you'd like to listen to the premier episode and show notes, you can find it here: Getting Acquainted with Physician NonClinical Careers Podcast – 001

The post Follow These Steps to Create an Awesome LinkedIn Profile – 009 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.