networking Archives - 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.

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career that you love. To find out more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.

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!

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 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.

Why Your Nonclinical Job Search Is So Frustrating and Unproductive – 290

John Jurica — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 13:30:44 +0000

Address These Potential Errors

In today's show, John describes why a nonclinical job search is so frustrating and unproductive at times. And he suggests ways to overcome those frustrations.

It can feel like we’re bogged down and not making any progress once we’ve decided to pursue that first nonclinical position.

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 Your Job Search Is So Frustrating

Part of the explanation is that we may be expecting too much. When making such a drastic move the path is often not as straightforward as we’re expecting. And we must learn a whole new set of skills.

Common frustrations result from NOT doing the following:

Fully committing to the process,
Addressing your self-limiting beliefs,
Devoting insufficient time to the process,
Narrowing our search to one specific job,
Obtaining new skills to demonstrate your commitment,
Finding and engaging a mentor or two,
Growing your network and finding a sponsor at each company,
Optimizing your LinkedIn profile, and,
Converting your CV to a winning resumé.

Reflect on These Possible Barriers

If you're months into your job search and have submitted hundreds of resumés online with no response, you may have glossed over one of the above steps. And you'll find your job search is so frustrating at times.

Consider each step and determine which one might be undermining your efforts. The ones that I see limiting forward progress most often are not focusing like a laser on one specific job, and failing to identify a sponsor at each company that interests you.

Summary

Pursuing a first nonclinical job requires a number of new skills. Consider each step carefully since a weak link in the process of identifying, pursuing, and landing that first job can undermine the whole process.

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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If you enjoyed today’s episode, share it on Twitter and Facebook, and leave a review on iTunes.

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Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 290

Why Your Nonclinical Job Search Is So Frustrating and Unproductive

John: Let's talk about the content of today's episode. Let's say you've made a decision to leave clinical practice, and you've taken the steps necessary to identify some possible jobs, narrow them down, search through a variety of job listings, and submitted your resume to accompany your recruiter's website.

But in spite of submitting dozens of resumes, it's just crickets. No response other than an occasional acknowledgement that the resume was received. But no one is offering you an interview, even a screening interview. So, let's talk today about why that might be.

But I want to set the stage a little bit more tightly here in the sense that we're talking about leaving clinical medicine or nursing or another clinical field for a job that does not include direct patient care. That's what we're talking about in terms of a nonclinical or non-traditional job. But we're not talking about those of you who are starting your own freelance consulting, medical writing, or coaching business. I'm talking about the situation where you're looking for a nonclinical position in which you're employed by usually a medium to large size corporation, such as an insurance company, hospital or hospital system, a pharma company, a contract research organization, or even a consulting firm, or a large publishing company.

This is the formal process of finding a job and trying to apply and then get your first interview. That's the timeframe we're talking about. And I have talked to several people, many people who have gone through that process for month after month, have submitted dozens if not hundreds of resumes, and have received no kind of follow up other than an acknowledgement. So, what the heck could be going wrong in that situation? Because it just sounds like you're just spinning your wheels.

So, let's start at the very beginning. Things that might be going on that are keeping you from moving forward. Now, there's this whole category of mindset. Do you have the commitment? Have you already addressed the self-limiting beliefs? Have you gone through and convinced yourself that some of the myths around nonclinical jobs are false?

I'll talk about the myths related to physicians, which we've done an entire episode on before. But again, just quickly, it's things like the fact that there's no jobs out there. I don't have enough education. I need another degree. I'm going to be abandoning my patients. I can't make enough to pay my bills in a nonclinical job, or my gravitas or my reputation will be adversely affected. I won't be a doctor anymore.

Well, we've already dispelled all of those in past episodes. There are plenty of jobs. You have 70 to 80% of the necessary skills you need to become a medical director or physician advisor, or a chief medical officer or chief medical information officer or chief quality officer. You have to get past these mindset issues, and we've talked about that before.

And the other thing is, you really have to make that commitment. There's a difference between being upset, being burnt out, being dissatisfied, but at some point, you've got to say, "Okay, I've had enough and I'm going to keep working. I'm not going to burn my bridges, but I'm going to set time aside to really work on this problem." You can't do this spending a few minutes a week or an hour every two weeks trying to do some research, pick a job, do your application. It takes more time than that.

That's what I mean by commitments. It's the mental commitment and it's the actual time commitment. So you have to block time out. It could be two hours a week, it could be 30 minutes a day, but there's a lot of steps you have to go through before you can really make this process move forward. Otherwise you're just spinning your wheels.

So, how much time can you set aside and can you put that on your calendar? Now, if you're working a full-time job and you're working 40, 50, 60 hours a week, it's going to be difficult. But you might have to just take part of Saturday or Sunday when you're hopefully not on call or whatever day during the week that you have off and not really be doing your charts and things like that. And really set this time aside to do some of the other things I'm going to be talking about in the next 15 minutes.

The other part of that commitment is if you're really committed. You have to see if maybe you can carve out some time in your current job. Go to your boss, go to your manager and say, "Look, I signed up to work 40, 50 hours a week. I am spending 65, 70 hours a week with all the charting I have to do and the meetings and other things that are going on. That's not really fair. So, I need to pull back, but still within my contract so that I can free up time to do other things that I need to do, that I want to do."

And so, you just need to have a, a, a conversation with that person that's responsible for your schedule, if it's not you and carve out some extra time. Full-time job should not take 80 hours or 70 hours a week. It just shouldn't. Now, if you're in private practice and you run the practice and you're the owner of the practice, that's going to be tough, but I think you're going to have to say, "Look it, we're closing on Friday afternoons. We're not going to be open every week."

Now, what are you going to do at that time once you've made the commitment and you've convinced yourself it's doable and it can happen, and that you have the requisite skills? Well, there's some things you need to look at. You need to do some research early on, and this is not to just find the jobs that you are going to apply to. In other words, you're not just looking "Okay, I'm going to find them. That sounds really good, and I'm going to apply." No, you need to do significant research during that time that you've blocked out.

That research needs to be, "What do these jobs entail?" You have to get it called down to a small number of possible jobs. You have to read about these jobs online. Go to Facebook groups, get a book on nonclinical career careers, or at least five or six really good books. Talk to your friends and find out what the jobs entail, and then narrow it down to two or three.

And before you get real serious for applying this one job we're talking about, you got to get it down to one. So, let's say you want to try medical science liaison or another pharma job, or maybe a job in the hospital setting. What jobs are available? You look up physician advisor in a hospital, you look up medical director, you look up a medical director and pharma, and try and look at those job descriptions, not because you're looking for the one you want to apply for now, it's because you want to see what the keywords in those jobs are and what does the job entail. Can I work four days a week? Can I do it from home, or do I have to travel? And that kind of thing.

And so, get a sense of what's out there, and then try and narrow it down. And then once you narrow it down, do some other things. If you've got to narrow it down to one job, let's say you want to become an MSL. I'll use it as an example, because we talk about that all the time. We've done several podcasts on that. Then you need to find an MSL or two to be a mentor. And then you might consider looking at a professional organization that serves MSLs. And there's a good one that actually will teach you how to become an MSL. And there are books on becoming an MSL.

And this is true as a medical writer for a CRO or a pharma company. This is true if you're a medical director for a hospital. There are resources to learn what the job entails. And once you've got a sense that, okay, it's in person and it's 09:00 to 05:00 five days a week, that's one thing. If it's remote, it's at home on my own time, that's another thing. If I'm going to be traveling, that's another thing. How much travel is required? Try to get those things down path and your understanding and really pick the one to go for.

Now, it may not be the one you ultimately choose to take, and maybe once you get into the process, you're going to have to reassess and then shift gears and go to another job. But you only want to go after one at a time. So, now while you're in the process of doing that, you need to find that mentor that's going to tell you more about the job, how they got their job, pitfalls to avoid and so forth.

If you haven't done that and you don't have a mentor, then you're really going to be going into it blind. So, definitely you need a mentor. Maybe you found out that you need a certificate or some additional training. It can just be classes, it can be courses through the AAPL, it can be courses through a professional society, or it can actually be a bona fide, let's say 10 hour course with a certificate exam at the end, something like that. And this all can add to your resume. So you got to think about that.

And then get that additional experience and training while you're going through this process by either volunteering on a nonprofit or volunteering on committees so that you can get some experience, whether it's with quality on a quality committee, whether it's about policies and procedures, whether it is something about project planning on a committee that's putting in a new service line or something like that in the hospital. Or even on a nonprofit they'll have some project planning committees that you may be able to function on and learn from. You're doing all these things simultaneously. And that's where you're saying aside the five hours every two weeks or two or three hours a week to really do your research, find out what's out there, and then narrow in.

Now while you're doing all that and you're working with your mentor, once it's down to one area, now you need to go back and look at those job descriptions again, only this time for the specific position you want to apply for. If it's a remote position, it could be anywhere in the country. If it's in person, then you're going to need to find something either close to where you live or you're going to have to think about relocating if it's worth doing.

Most medical communication companies, for example, are in larger metropolitan areas. So if you're out in the country, you might have to move closer to city like New York, LA, Chicago, or even any big city. It doesn't have to be a multi-million-person city, but a metropolitan area. It could be Austin, it could be anything. The capital of most states are pretty big, but you want to see if they have one of those companies located there because you got to make some plans about actually moving.

Once you've resolved that issue, you should already be working on setting up your LinkedIn profile.

And you want a profile that's complete. And if it's not, and if it doesn't include some kind of description of what you're looking for, that's the first place someone is going to go to look if they're serious about hiring you. They may not look up every applicant on LinkedIn, but at some point they're going to actually probably look you up on lots of social media to see if you've done anything stupid, to see if maybe there's something out there that's embarrassing or shows something that might be alarming to an employer.

I won't get into the details of that, but look at all those sites and then make sure that your LinkedIn profile is 100% complete, has some of those keywords and a good description of what you're looking for. Unless your current employer might see that, in which case you might have to be a little bit more subtle about your profile on LinkedIn.

Then the next thing. Now you're looking for jobs, you've identified the type of job that you want and you've identified the region of the country you might need to work in. And then you're looking at the specific job listings, and you're really going to look to see if this is a job that you want to pursue. And when you do that, figure out the company.

And now you have to do more networking, your own network, the networks of your network contacts, first degree, secondary, third degree. It's just like in LinkedIn. You've got your first degree, and your second degree, and that's how you extend your network. You want to meet new people doing that job or having something to do with that job and whatever industry you're looking for. And then you have to reach out to some of them to see, "Okay, what's going on at that company? I've looked at this job description, I'm kind of interested. I see that you work there. I wonder if we could get on the phone or even just chat by email for a few minutes so I can get a little more information."

And somehow what you want to do ideally is to find a sponsor. I use that word for different things. If you're employed, let's say in a hospital and you want to move up the ranks into management, then you need a sponsor within that hospital or any other company that will help get the word out inside the organization that you're available, that you're interested, that you're capable, and those sorts of things. That's what we call a sponsor within a company.

But a sponsor when you're trying to break into a company is someone in that company who is either involved directly with the HR department, the hiring manager, or something like that, or even another person who's currently working in that company that can help be your sponsor, say, "Hey, I've got this colleague, I've got this friend, I've got this, cousin. I've got this associate that I know is really good at what they do. They're thinking of moving into this. In fact, they've committed themselves to moving into this particular industry. They've looked at a couple of our jobs, and I wonder, can I make sure that you get this colleague of mine, their resume? Can I make sure that you've at least looked at it? Is there something I need to do? Is there someone else I can send my friend or my colleague to learn more about this job?" And that's your internal company sponsor in that firm where you are now actively applying.

So, you definitely don't want to just start shoveling resumes into 5, 10, 20 companies, even a hundred companies. That's happened. I've talked to people that have done that and expect that somehow you're going to float to the top because your resume is probably going to look like a lot of other resumes. You want to follow a proper way of doing a resume no longer than two pages.

You want to make sure that you put in your resume the skills that you have as evidenced by things that you have accomplished, preferably those that are measurable. So, it could be something as simple as "I led a team that put together this service line in this hospital. Or in my clinic of 30 physicians, I led a team that created this new product, or this new initiative." That doesn't have a measurement, but it's a plus minus, it's an all or none. So, you went from not having that service to having it. Or I was working on the committee and became the chair of the committee that oversaw the quality for such and such, and we improved the number of complications in the surgery department by 10% or 30%. We eliminated never events. We did these measurable outcomes. That should all be on the front page.

And then after that, you'll have your listing of where you did your residency, your fellowship, your education, college. Other experiences that will demonstrate your transferable skills such as chairing a committee at a hospital, chairing a committee at a nonprofit, and being the president of the board of a nonprofit, things like that. Volunteering for something, and then the fact that there was something accomplished.

If you're not doing all of those things, there's a pretty good chance that your resume will not make it through the first or second screening where someone's actually looking at it, assessing it, trying to decide whether you can do the job that they're looking for. Now, remember, what is it that is going on here when you're looking for these kinds of jobs? You're back in the regular job market now. It's not like in medical school and residency where you're looking at grades and GPA and scores on certain exams and just checking off all those boxes.

The person who's hiring you for a nonclinical job, whether it's a utilization management, physician advisor or a medical director is "Can that person deliver to me what I need?" And in many of these jobs, you have to have a lot of initiative and leadership because as you get into more management jobs, they're going to need to see evidence that you were able to accomplish things on a team. But again, measurable outcomes.

My examples. Let's say for my time as a CMO, if I was applying for another job as a CMO, I would say, "Look, we put in a brand new comprehensive case management system, with different staffing and formal protocols, and we were able to get the length of stay down for the medical patients on any given unit or what have you, or even for the whole hospital by half a day or a full day. Or we reduce the mortality rate for heart disease or let's say acute MI or heart failure by such and such percent." What they want to see is that you can accomplish the goals of their department or the organization that they're hiring you too. And if you can't demonstrate on your resume and you can't verbalize it when you do get the interview, it's going to be hard to get that job.

I guess I would stop there because the other things I would mention that might be interfering might be things that have to do with the interview itself or the things that happen after the interview. Maybe I'll spend a little more time on that on another episode. But for now, those are the things that I would focus on. You need to be committed. You need to carve out time every week or every other week to focus on this. Some of that time needs to be spent doing your research to find out what you really want to do.

You have to spend some time narrowing it down to one particular type of job, customizing your resume, and customizing your LinkedIn profile. Find a mentor or two to help you and do your networking, and grow your network. Make as many contacts as you can that might help you get into one of those jobs. You might need a contact at multiple different companies if you're applying at multiple different companies. That's where your sponsor comes in and gets someone to look at that resume.

And then by doing that, you'll be in a much better position to have someone actually send you an email, pick up the phone and say, "Hey, we've looked things over. I have a few questions for you, but if this goes well, then we're going to set up an interview, a series of interviews, really. Maybe the first one will be a remote online interview, and then hopefully after that, potentially even a live interview face-to-face."

All right. Well, that's all that I wanted to say today about why your job search is so frustrating and unproductive. And by addressing these things that maybe have not been addressed in a really consistent way, you can overcome some of that frustration and the lack of progress.

One other thing to consider that might be adding to the frustration that doesn't really have to do directly with the process is having the right expectations. Sometimes in these job searches, it's going to take a while. It's something new, you haven't done it before, and you're going to need to learn the whole process. You're going to get better at the process. Every step of the process takes practice. And the other thing is that you're going to have to send in a lot of resumes and do a lot of digging before you're going to get that first interview. That's normal. And also chances are you're going to have to do multiple interviews before you get that first job offer. Because doing an interview is a skill that takes a little bit of practice. You can do role-playing. Other things that we'll talk about another time.

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The post Why Your Nonclinical Job Search Is So Frustrating and Unproductive – 290 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.

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Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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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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The post Podcast Blast From the Past: 8 Mistakes That Derail a Job Search – 270 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

The Powerful But Overlooked Impact of Networking – 078

John Jurica — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 12:30:11 +0000

An Important Career Strategy

In today's solo episode, I tackle the topic of networking. This is the first in a series of mini solo episodes I'll be adding to my usual shows. My plan is to devote my regular weekly podcast episodes to interviews. I continue to learn greatly from my guests. And, I know you enjoy the interviews.

I'm putting together a course that will be hosted on Teachable. It's devoted to this topic: How to Secure Your First Job as an MSL. As part of that course, one of the lessons presents five strategies used in any career search. Those strategies are:

the use of mentors,
joining pertinent professional organizations,
using the resources available on LinkedIn,
writing an effective resume, and
networking.

A Neglected Topic

I realized that I had written or podcasted about four of those topics. However, I have never devoted an episode to networking. Hence, in today's show, I describe how I've benefited from networking. And I suggest different approaches to networking you can try.

Finally, I offer suggestions for regularly incorporating networking into your career search.

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This podcast is made possible by the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program offered by the Haslam College of Business.

The UT PEMBA is the longest running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country, with over 650 graduates. It only takes a year to complete.

University of Tennessee PEMBA students bring exceptional value to their organizations. The curriculum includes a number of major assignments and a company project.

If you want to acquire the business and management skills needed to advance your nonclinical career, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office by calling (865) 974-6526 or going to vitalpe.net/physicianmba.

I hope to see you next time on the PNC Podcast.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, share it on Twitter and Facebook, and leave a review on iTunes.

Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton.

Disclaimers:

Many of the links that I refer you to, and that you’ll find in the show notes, are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so has no effect on the price you are charged. And I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you, that I have personally used or am very familiar with.

The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. It should not be construed as medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counsellor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career.

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

Here are the easiest ways to listen:

vitalpe.net/itunes – vitalpe.net/stitcher

The post The Powerful But Overlooked Impact of Networking – 078 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.

Reasons to Be LinkedIn

For physician managers, executives, consultants, coaches, pharma representatives, or those planning to pursue a career in any nonclinical field, LinkedIn is a must.

Here are the reasons I find it so useful to be LinkedIn. Most of them relate directly to its status as an online resume, which facilitates the following activities.

1. Job Hunting

By updating in your profile and participating in LinkedIn jobs, you can constantly receive alerts about new jobs that match your search criteria. Remember, your profile is an online resume. It needs to be detailed, clear, complete and authentic, like any resume or CV. But it can present much more information, and is suited to providing details of your values and long-term goals.

It should contain your complete employment history (no gaps), educational background, other experience, and endorsements from those that know you well (professionally).

Think of this as creating your own personal brand that can be used for a variety of purposes, but especially job hunting. Describing your vision, values, goals and passions can be very attractive to employers looking for certain attributes.

2. Connections and Followers

LinkedIn provides recommendations for potential connections in an ongoing basis. You can cull your existing email lists and or manually search for connections to add. But LinkedIn also facilitates the process of identifying new connections.

It will use your first degree connections to identify second and third degree connections. You can message them and invite them to connect. (Premium services are more helpful and flexible in this regard).

You can identify people in your workplace, and alumni from your undergraduate school, medical school, and residency programs to connect with or follow.

Once you've developed this network, you can sort and categorize them for information you want to send them. You can message them, ask them questions, and consult with them in ways that helps each of you professionally.

I currently have almost 550 connections and another 20 members that follow me.

3. Get Published

LinkedIn encourages you to post articles to showcase your expertise and writing skills. This will help with your career advancement, but also with network development and promotion of your side business or consulting practice.

Posting on LinkedIn enhances your authority and reputation by allowing you to share articles from other sources, or your own original writing. You can repurpose chapters from books or blog posts you've written.

If you happen to write your own blog or host a podcast, by posting articles on LinkedIn, you can encourage readers to visit your sites, and generate business for any venture you may be involved with.

I post my blog articles directly to LinkedIn using Buffer, and they typically generate about 200 views each, depending on the topic.

The last article I posted, Every Emerging Physician Executive Must Learn These New Skills, received 364 views. My most popular article, The Best Hospitals Are Managed by Physicians, attracted 554 readers.

4. Groups

There are hundreds of groups on LinkedIn that can expand your reach and serve as a source of education and networking. I'm personally a member of 14 groups, most of which are related to physician leadership, hospital executive interests, and non-clinical careers. I also enjoy the conversations posted to the Writing on LinkedIn Group.

These groups serve as another source of connections. You can interact with your group members even if they are not one of your connections or followers. You can post specific articles and opinions to your group and thereby encourage interaction with other members. I find this to be a very useful reason to be LinkedIn.

5. Great News Source

Depending on your connections and the groups you've joined, you will receive an ongoing flow of information similar to that of Facebook and other social media sites.

You can access the news in two ways. By following other members, you receive their posts. To follow new members, you can manage your feed preferences by clicking the More icon on any post. Then you add persons to follow from the Improve My Feed list, or the Followers list.

News and other content is also delivered to you daily from each of your groups. When you enter the Groups area, you're be presented with Today's Highlights, which presents a personalized selection of conversations from your groups.

6. LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn Learning grew out of LinkedIn's purchase of Lynda.com. It has taken this content and merged it with its professional networking. I believe there is a monthly fee to access LinkedIn Learning, but it is included in Premium memberships.

There is a library of over 9,000 digital courses. And LinkedIn Learning will create personalized recommendations of courses for you, based on your interests and expressed needs. These courses can be accessed anytime, anywhere on cell phones and other personal devices.

I've just begun to explore their business courses, and they look very professionally produced.

Bonus Reason: It's Free!

One of the big reasons to sign up is that you get all of this for free. There are premium services that can sometimes be useful, but are not required. Everything I've presented is free, except for the ability to reach out to second and third degree networks, and LinkedIn Learning, both of which are included in the premium membership plans.

I've been growing my network on LinkedIn for about two years, mostly using the free membership.

In Closing

Any physician that has professional activities outside of clinical medicine, particularly a career as a hospital or medical group executive, consultant or coach, absolutely must have a LinkedIn profile. However, to have a poor LinkedIn profile may be worse than having no profile.

So, if you join LinkedIn, be sure that you complete your profile 100%. You should upload a professionally done portrait. And you ought to clearly articulate your goals and values. I would also recommend you check out LinkedIn Learning to see if there's information there that can be of benefit to you.

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Have you found LinkedIn to be valuable? Do you have questions about LinkedIn?

Next Steps

Please add you're thoughts and questions in the Comments. I will respond to them all.

Don't forget to SHARE this post, SUBSCRIBE Here or complete a SURVEY.

Contact me: johnjurica@nonclinical.buzzmybrand.net or leave me a Voice Message here.

Thanks for joining me.

Until next time.

The post Top Reasons to Be LinkedIn appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

networking Archives - NonClinical Physicians

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

A Great Tool to Find Your First Nonclinical Job

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Unleashing the Power of LinkedIn: Four Key Topics

Summary

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Why Your Nonclinical Job Search Is So Frustrating and Unproductive – 290

Address These Potential Errors

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Reflect on These Possible Barriers

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

How to Network Effectively on the Road to a New Career

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How to Network

Networking Etiquette

Dr. John Jurica's Advice

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

And How to Avoid Them

8 Mistakes

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

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#2 – Being intimidated by a job description.

#3 – Preparing a CV rather than a resumé.

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

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

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

#7 – Not taking the interview seriously

#8 – Not preparing sufficiently

BONUS Mistakes to AVOID:

Summary

Links for Today's Episode:

Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton

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The Powerful But Overlooked Impact of Networking – 078

An Important Career Strategy

A Neglected Topic

Our Sponsor

Disclaimers:

Follow These Steps to Create an Awesome LinkedIn Profile – 009

Book Review

Steps to Create an Awesome LinkedIn Profile

Step-by-Step

My LinkedIn Profile

Further Improvements

Top Reasons to Be LinkedIn

My LinkedIn Story

Reasons to Be LinkedIn

1. Job Hunting

2. Connections and Followers

3. Get Published

4. Groups

5. Great News Source

6. LinkedIn Learning

Bonus Reason: It's Free!

In Closing

Next Steps