So, these are the five phases that I mentioned. And as I alluded to, I was kind of doing parts of this haphazardly in the beginning and it really was highly inefficient and it wasn’t until I met with a mentor on a regular basis that we were able to kind of line up these steps. And so, I’m gonna go through these one by one, but it’s introspection, exploration, preparation, acquisition, and transition. You know, these aren’t mutually exclusive from a timing standpoint but they should stay fairly sequential. So, for example, you really shouldn’t be applying for jobs not having gone through a few of these first few phases and really understanding what it is you’re looking for, why you’re looking for that, and having a good sense that it might be a good match for you. So, I really think going through this sequentially is ideal if you can do that.
So, the first part is introspection. So really, what are you seeking, and maybe more importantly, why are you seeking that? What is it that you really want out of your career, and what is it that you’re looking for next, and why is it that you’re looking to leave your current career? So, there are four main career drivers and they’re shown here in the larger circles to the outer aspect. It’s something you love, something the world needs, something that pays, and something matching your skills. And when you look at these four, you may wanna achieve all of these, and that’s really the ideal if you can achieve all of these. And you see that asterisk in the center there. That’s really the ideal, I think. But you may look and say, “Do you know what, I’m at a financial position where I don’t necessarily need something that pays. I’m looking to have something rewarding and something that’s helpful to others.” And maybe you can eliminate that lower circle or maybe there are a couple of circles that you can eliminate and try and just kind of optimize given your current situation what is important to you and how are you going to go about achieving that.
So, I spent a lot of time on introspection. And I think this is something that, you know, when I talk to a lot of doctors who are considering changing careers, I think they gloss over this a little too much. And it wasn’t until I got my mentor to help me that we really spent a lot of time on this and this helped with everything that followed. So basically, I made a list of everything I liked and everything I disliked about my current job in clinical practice. And then we factored in some other things that I might like or dislike about future jobs as well.
And so that list was really long. It’s like this long laundry list. And in its laundry list form, it wasn’t very helpful. There were things in there like I don’t like, carrying a beeper, and I knew that once I went on to a different type of career, I wouldn’t have to carry a beeper. So that become irrelevant. But at the same time, it wasn’t irrelevant because it said something about what’s down towards the bottom here. It’s really, I think the beeper speaks to manageable workload and schedule control.
So, when I listed out, for example, getting called back in after going home at night and when I listed out carrying a beeper, things like that actually then got combined into larger themes or categories and that’s what you see here. It’s really the themes that you’re seeing here. And it took a while to get to that. It was going through this laundry list and trying to figure out what these themes were. And really for me, it boiled down to these six items that you see here. So, what I was looking for in my optimal job was intellectual challenge, team environment, sense of accomplishment, financial reward, manageable workload, and schedule control.
And so, once I prioritized that, I really had something to work with. And I’ll show you as the presentation goes on that I used this when assessing each one of the future potential jobs that I was looking at and also in assessing my career and where it was at any given point down the road, and I scored each one of these items at a five and then added them up. And what you can see here is that when I was in clinical practice, these are the numbers. So, I didn’t leave space for…I didn’t allow any zeros or fractions, so I had to start with at least one. Otherwise, I think that bottom two items would’ve been a zero out of five. I had no manageable workload and I had no schedule control. And you see the other items here are pretty reasonable. But the two at the bottom really, as I thought about this a lot, were really the driving force behind my decision to make a career change at that time. And so, those were some of the items I would really be looking at as I explored future opportunities.