Building your resumé. Put as many stars as you can fit next to this in your course book. Once you’ve decided what you wanna do, this should be your job number one, which can go parallel to actually tryin’ to find a job and researching. What you wanna do is you wanna demonstrate competence and interest in the field that you’re targeting. So you wanna give the employer that’s looking at you things to sink their teeth into. They can say, “Oh, this person’s interested in this. You know what? This person’s actually pretty good at this. This person has some experience doing this.” You’re gonna be way ahead of the competition.
So we had a doctor. She was a TV reporter, so she was the medical correspondent in a number of towns. She was very, very good at it. How did she get started? She hired, on her own money, a TV producer and a cameraman to start doing two or three sample stories that she could then show people. She could put it on her resumé. “I did this freelance thing, I did that freelance thing, and I have the tapes available. You can see how I’m gonna do my work. So I’m not gonna tell you how well I can do this. I’m gonna show you,” right.
We had a doctor speak for us, wonderful woman. She, formerly a hospital CEO. How did she get started? She didn’t do that right away. She was working in the health system, and they offered her a job as a part-time medical director. Well, now, if you’re looking to get into administration, that’s a great to build your resumé. Mike, he did some part-time writing. He was able to show that to the communication companies. “Here’s my work product, and it’s on my resume. It’s on my CV that is demonstrating that I’m serious about this and that I have experience about this.”
You wanna get into pharma? What are they looking for? People that are familiar with the process, people that are familiar with how it works. So how are you gonna do that? Get involved on the provider side in clinical trials. Become a principal investigator. Become a sub-investigator. Think strategically, “How am I gonna be able to do this stuff?” Build that resumé, make yourself stand out from the competition, and demonstrate to these people that you’re really interested in this field because you wouldn’t go do this stuff unless you were. We talked about disability reviews, working for an insurance company doing disability work. Try to do that work on a contract basis. Shows that you’re interested, shows that you can do it. You might be able to share, redact it out, some of your work product to demonstrate, “Hey, this is how I should do it.” Okay.
Now, the other thing that this does for you is you figure out if you like it or not. So you go, you take a job for a part-time medical director at your local hospital. Maybe you hate it. Maybe you don’t wanna do that. So you can test the waters a little bit, right. Anybody that demonstrates leadership is gonna stand out to an employer. What I mean is people that aren’t afraid to take on a lot of work. So my kid’s applying to college right now, and one of the things that they have on the Common App…he’s a senior…is, you know, “What are your extracurricular activities?” Do they really care what particular club that you’re in? No. What they’re looking for is people that can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time, people that aren’t complaining, “I’m too busy. I can’t do that. I can’t do this.” People that are gonna be successful because they can manage a lot of things at once, people that have some ambition and aren’t just gonna do the bare minimum. And, by demonstrating leadership, being on this committee, being on that committee, being active in your community, whatever it is, I think you’re making a positive message to potential employers and I think you’re building your resumé.
The other thing that you can do to both learn and to demonstrate interest in a field is join the professional societies. So if you’re interested in insurance medicine, working for a life insurance company, join the American Academy of Insurance Medicine, right. You’re demonstrating, “Hey, I am serious about this. This just isn’t a whim.” Because if you’re serious about it, you’re much more likely to do a good job, and you’re much more likely to be happy, and you’re much more likely to stick around. Because they don’t wanna hire you, you’d be miserable, they’ve gotta replace you in six months. Nobody wants to do that. So I can’t say strongly enough that, once you figure out the field or the fields that you wanna target, you wanna think about, really think about, “How am I gonna build my resumé in this field so I’ve got some ammunition, I’ve got something that I can use for talking points, and, you know, there’s things on my resumé that are gonna stand out amongst the competition.” Build that resumé, job number one.