⭕️ Sharmi Haque ✨🌟

I'm curious, what was your advice for your friend? My take (general philosophy + tangible steps): Philosophy - It's really hard to just jump out of Medicine without having put in years of work developing a skillset/network. The UK healthtech (et al) market is not super hot, and it's competitive. - for every story about a medic successfully leaving, there are 10 who tried and failed - so I'd view this as a multi-year project, not a quick thing - I had a lot of arrogance thinking that Doctors are massively demand in the private sector, just because we are doctors. Not true. People hardly care. - For your initial move out, I think it's worth picking something healthcare-related. At least you'll have a leg up from your clinical xp Assuming your friend is like most of us at the start, i.e. has no sellable skillset outside of Medicine — options are: - Continue in Medicine and start developing a skillset (can go LTFT). E.g. coding healthcare related projects (you'll have much more advice on this), freelance creative work for agencies/startups, beg/borrow/steal to get internships. You need to create a portfolio/body of work you can point to. Realistically, you need to be able to point to a few things that you have made, examples: coding: I created a 'chatGPT' for primary care demo, I contributed to this public repo, I launched this startup creative: I made this creative work for X startup (can be graphics, video, podcast whatever) internships: I led X project which resulted in at this startup - If interested in consulting, bear in mind that landing a position in the most prestigious firms (MBB) is as hard as getting into Harvard. If you're the Oxbridge/London/AFP calibre of Medic — then sure it's possible. But you'll need to put at least 6 months of dedicated work into this. If you thought F1 was hard, you're about to enter something 2x as intense Join fishbowl, start cold messaging medics who have entered consulting, go to consulting 'open days'. (Caveat: I have no xp in this). - an underrated path is via research. E.g. can do AFP/ACP (or research outside of a formal training programme) and leverage these connections to get startup roles. can also use this to develop useful skillsets (data science/python/stats etc etc). - another path is pharma (e.g. medical liaisons). I have no xp with this though. - If you have no idea what you could do, it's not a bad idea to spend a year on learning about the landscape (@azeemaa100's BiteLabs Fellowship, NHS Clinical Entrepreneur, MBA/MPH/comp sci type masters... Biggest benefit to all of these is network IMO The best piece of advice I received was to get a blank sheet of paper, and write down everything you've achieved in the last few years. Until this piece of paper looks impressive, I think stay in med and start populating this sheet Caveat: Sometimes through raw hustle/grit/bravery — you can fall into opportunities with no skillset. Definitely worth trying this (essential reading: The Third Door), but don't rely on it More essential reading: the Dilbert career advice dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_bl… "Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix."

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