Do You Feel Like You Wasted All That Training?

8. Why did it take so long to make the transition?

At first glance, the two years probably seems like a long time.  Living through it certainly felt endless at the time.

I attribute the amount of time to several factors.  First of all, prior to the point of deciding that I wanted to pursue a new job, I was so busy trying to make my clinical practice successful that I had limited time to spare.  Deciding to explore alternative options threw open a door that I had never even noticed before.  I had to start from scratch.  Even after deciding to leave clinical practice, I was still fairly busy with my “day job.”  This practical challenge became especially frustrating.  Unlike the way this would be depicted in a novel or movie, I was not in a financial position to walk away from my practice and “find myself.”  Through after-hours search efforts, I gathered information from multiple parallel processes, including regular meetings with my mentor, networking, and online research.

During these two years of exploring alternative options, I followed a systematic process of exploring potential job types, identifying my areas of interest, and pursuing a position.  This process was more involved and time consuming than I would have imagined.  Without a methodical approach to this task, however, it is very likely that my career transition would not have happened, or perhaps even worse – that I might have entered a similarly non-satisfying position in a different industry. 

Networking required a great deal of effort to overcome the initial inertia and place the gears in motion.  In the beginning I was only contacting one or two people every couple of weeks.  As a result, it took several months before I was speaking to people who could directly influence my career path.  Once I established a network of people in medical communications, my area of interest, I had to wait for new positions to become available. 

My online research was particularly inefficient.  Much of the problem was caused by searching for open positions before I had spent adequate time fully understanding which types of jobs were best for me.  I did not realize until afterwards that I applied for several positions that did not require medical expertise and therefore did not meet my salary threshold.  There are a handful of well-defined job titles that are appropriate for physicians within the pharmaceutical and medical communications industries.  Unless you know what these are, or have someone who can help direct you toward them, trying to match your skill set to these jobs is equivalent to finding a needle in a haystack.

I now look back on the amount of time that it took me to hone in on hand surgery – the last two years of high school, four years of college, four years of medical school, and the first three years of my surgical training – and understand that the two years I spent evaluating and entering this new industry were actually relatively efficient and quite successful. 

Five years after making the transition, I was a satisfied business owner with a positive outlook on my future.  Becoming established in my new career took far less time than the effort involved to begin practicing medicine.