Careers outside medicine

A medical degree can open up a wide variety of career options to you, but if you’re considering a complete change in direction you will need to spend time doing some serious research and checking that you’re doing it for the right reasons. For instance, it’s a myth that you will automatically earn more money, work fewer hours and have less stress in a non-medical career.

Recognise your transferable skills

With a medical degree you’re eligible for the whole range of jobs open to graduates of any discipline, which is about half of all careers. In these jobs your medical background won’t be of direct relevance but the transferable or generic skills you’ve developed will count. You should be able to turn to your advantage the fact that you’ll have worked in real life settings throughout your medical degree and picked up skills that are highly valued by graduate employers. Your medical education and experience will have given you plenty of opportunities to develop transferable skills including:

• working in teams
• time management
• problem solving
• decision making
• working under pressure
• communication skills
• analysing data
• planning.

Investigate alternative options

A good way to start your research is by reading up on alternative careers in sector-specific publications. Your university’s careers service should be well equipped with useful resources on a variety of careers (for example, the TARGETjobs range of publications). Booking an appointment with a careers adviser will help you to work out what skills you want to use in a job and how you can sell yourself to prospective employers. You can also go to graduate careers fairs to find out what sort of positions graduate employers recruit for.

Making use of your medical knowledge

There are broader sectors and more specialised positions where your medical and scientific background would be advantageous or essential. For some of these positions it’s worth bearing in mind that substantial experience of medical practice could be necessary or that further qualifications or retraining may be required. Research into the individual sectors is a must. Contacting organisations who actively recruit doctors is a step in the right direction – to find out which these are check out the BMJ careers website as well as medical publications.

Health-related alternatives

• Alternative and complementary medicine: To practise any branch of alternative medicine requires specialist training (sometimes to degree level). Your medical knowledge is likely to be useful if an understanding of topics such as physiology or anatomy is part of the training.
• Civil service, management and medical politics: Government departments have openings in management, administration, research and policy formation for which people with medical backgrounds are sought. Senior management level jobs such as clinical and medical directorships would certainly require a substantial period of experience of work as a medical practitioner, and a similar depth of experience would be needed for working in an advisory capacity on medical councils, committees and national bodies.
• Medical journalism, publishing and informatics: Your degree could be a stepping stone to a career in medical journalism; however, it is a competitive field and some journalistic training would be helpful, as well as the willingness to work your way up from junior positions. Roles in STM (science, technical and medical) publishing are another possibility and a science background is a definite advantage.
• Medical law and medical defence organisations: With the advent of the litigation culture, the need for medically trained lawyers is likely to increase. A law degree will allow you to enter any area of law (before beginning a course you need to decide whether you want to practise as a barrister or a solicitor), but a period of time working in medicine will be necessary for medico-legal work. Medical protection societies and district coroner positions provide work for lawyers with medical backgrounds.
• Medical research charities: Research posts into specific areas of medicine are funded by medical research charities in a variety of settings (hospitals, universities etc). It is also an option to get directly involved in an organisation itself: this could include developing and administering research programmes, fundraising and working to raise public awareness.

Making a decision

There’s no shame if, after you’ve done your research, you decide in the end that you don’t want to leave medicine. If you’ve looked into the alternatives thoroughly and feel that a career change is right for you, be confident in your decision and remember that your skills will give you a real chance to succeed.