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Being a doctor is hard work! The demands on your time in clinical practice are already immense. And indeed one can carve out a very successful medical practice by just focusing on honing clinical skills alone. However, if you wanted to improve yourself, stand out from the crowd and open up opportunities to take your career in interesting directions, here are 7 useful additional skills that you can consider developing.
Let’s start with the elephant in the room: research. In fact, it is so intimately tied into the practice of medicine that it often forms one of the core criteria used to evaluate doctors for promotion.
But it’s not just good enough to do research *for the sake of doing research* - the goal is to do impactful research that addresses the big, important, practice-changing questions in medicine. It’s good to aim for such lofty targets - these papers are more likely to be included in high impact factor journals, be cited by others, and gain you more kudos in the international community as you present your research around the world at conferences.
Of course, this begs the question - just how do you do that?
If you’re a junior doctor, you’re probably trying to build your research portfolio from scratch. As the Chinese saying goes, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. So, you’ve got to start somewhere. Ask your senior colleagues if they have any projects they can contribute to - even better if it’s in a field that you’re interested in. Be prepared to say yes to anything and do anything from data collection to statistical analysis to paper writing. The goal is to be exposed to the research process, develop an understanding of how it works and pick up skills. Get familiar with statistical software like R, SPSS and good old Microsoft Excel. Seek to understand what’s going on with the statistics in your project - don’t just leave it to the statistician to figure out. Try your hand at writing the introduction (and learn how to do a good literature review) as well as the discussion (where you figure out what your results actually mean)
Ultimately the goal is to build skills and trade up for bigger and more impactful projects as you go along in your career.
You’re now a registrar or a newly minted consultant (or attending as they say in the US). You’re expected to contribute to your department’s research. What should you pursue? Good research is fundamentally about asking a good clinical question. Here are some questions to consider:
Often, it still pays to attach yourself to labs/study groups of other more experienced researchers. They have the advantage of having deep knowledge of the field and can provide you with insight and direction as to what topics to study.
What’s more, really good research can lay the foundation for startups or spin-offs which may have commercial value.
Grants are the rocket fuel that power advancements in research, medtech development and quality improvement projects. Investments need to be made in equipment, salaries of other researchers and in organising the trial itself. So, if these projects aren’t industry funded, they will require support from institutional funding bodies. This is where grant writing comes in. It’s extremely useful to know what makes a compelling grant application as well as how to strike the right tone in your presentations.
Sadly, there are no training programmes or online courses on “how to write a good grant”. We do wish there were! This is a learned skill - so get involved in grant writing if you can. And speak to other professors who have more experience than you.
Graphic design skills are very underrated. You might have great research (see point 1), but you still need to display it in an eye-catching manner during presentations and on posters. There’s a reason why the leading tech companies like Apple have focused so heavily on design!
There are plenty of good tools out there for graphic design - from online apps like Canva or Visme to lightweight apps (e.g. Sketch to the behemoth of Photoshop.
There are also tons of good tutorials out there for all of the above mentioned apps. You have your pick of free tutorials on Youtube or relatively cheap beginner courses on online teaching websites like Udemy / Skillshare. But - there’s no substitute for practice!
Don’t forget to pair beautiful designs with good copywriting. Writing copy in medicine is slightly different because you still want to be factual and represent viewpoints fairly. There’s also a skill in being able to explain difficult concepts to patients in an easy-to-understand fashion!
Ahh coding. The sexiest, most in-demand skill of the 21st century. But let’s be honest - even if you did know how to code, unless you’re a super genius, your skills probably wouldn’t be comparable to a full time engineer - simply because the pace of technological development moves so quickly and there are always new languages and new best practices being developed.
Perhaps a reasonable goal to aim for would be to have a foundational understanding of coding. What this means is that you’re able to:
With this, you’re empowered to be able to translate your clinical ideas into terms and functions that other engineers can appreciate - and you can direct them to build out the technical solution of your dreams (so we hope). We see the role of clinician-coders more as facilitators and orchestrators than actual technicians and engineers.
“Coding” is still a broad field - and it’s helpful to know what you plan to use your skills for before you commit to learning a language. Do you want to build phone apps, webpages or programs? You probably want to use that as a starting point to figure out which language(s) to learn. If you’re still stuck - Python is arguably the most useful and versatile language for clinicians as it has applications in research, AI programs and web development. Plus there are lots of libraries and readily available support out there in the Python community!
If you’re interested in learning more, check out these online courses and resources here https://hackernoon.com/top-5-courses-to-learn-python-in-2020-best-of-lot-bdq3y42
Every doctor is expected to be a teacher in some capacity, whether it is as simple as giving bedside tutorials to medical students to holding lectures in packed auditoriums. There’s no one *right* way to teach - so we won’t try to be prescriptive! Ultimately you can develop your own teaching style - our only tip would be to observe others who you think are good teachers and learn from them.
This is a very natural extension of teaching! There is so much information out there in medicine and there is a huge demand for people who can process it into a form that is easily digestible by the man on the street. Online content can take many forms from blog posts to podcasts to videos. Pick the platform that suits you - and the subject material - best.
Want to start a blog / podcast / YouTube channel? You can find lots of information online about how to do just that. But the most important thing is to just get started - you’ll learn a lot from just doing it. Perhaps the most crucial (but also most difficult) thing about this is to create content consistently.
The concept of bio design was popularised by the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign, which runs world-class training programmes that teach participants how to identify needs and create medtech products to address them.
However, programmes like these have grown beyond just teaching skills - they also function as semi-accelerators that plug clinicians into a whole network of engineers, investors and other startup founders. If you’re interested in developing medical technology products, definitely consider applying to join one of these programmes!
It’s one thing to read about these skills - but another to hear them taught by inspirational doctors who have leveraged on these skills to take their careers in interesting and unconventional directions. Listen to them share about their journeys and what they’ve learnt along the way on the Alternative CV podcast - available on iTunes / Google podcasts / Spotify or on https://alternativecv.fm.
