Career and Life Planning Guidebook for Medical Residents

F I E L D N O T E S “The first thing I always look for in a CV is if they are licensed in the state they plan on practicing. If they are not licensed, it would be nice to know if they have applied and when they sent in the application. This gives me an opportunity to discuss a realistic time frame of when they could start their practice in the community. This starts off our relationship with realistic expectations.” – Jace Jones, CEO, Brownwood Regional Medical Center 4. Certifications and Licensing Employers will always look to see if you are licensed to practice medicine in their state and whether or not you are board eligible/certified. List your state medical license(s) and include the effective dates of both active and inactive licenses. If you have already applied for a state license, indicate that on your CV by stating “pending”, “in process”, or “applied for”. If you are not yet board certified, you can state that you will be “board eligible upon completion of training.” When you complete training, you can change this to “board eligible” and once you have passedyour exams, change again to “board certified”. Also include the date of certification. We live in a world of numbers, codes, and licenses. At some point in the employment process, you’ll be required to submit some of this information, including Social Security Number, documentation of residency/work authorization status, and license and certificate numbers. Wait until this information is specifically requested before providing it to individuals and never include on your CV. While your CV should be detailed, you can avoid providing enough detail to make you a victim of identity theft! You will certainly list licenses and specialized certifications on your CV, just don’t provide specific numbers, codes, or special identifiers. 5. Experience Your experiences form the basis of your unique professional identity. Experiences, perhaps more than any other information on your CV, need to be formatted in such a way that draws attention to your particular strengths that apply to the position you are aiming for. The difficulty with the “experience” section is that you may not have any experience to add to their CV. Several of you went to college and then to medical school and then continued straight into your residency training. You may not have had yet a chance to ‘work in the real world”. Yes, you have been gaining “experience” during residency, but this still falls under “education”. There are many types of experience that are appropriate to include under experience in your CV. Moonlighting, medical volunteer work, mission trips, and any teaching or medically-related activity are all valuable experiences that demonstrate your value to an employer. You may not be receiving a paycheck, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t getting the experience. Don’t shortchange the value of an activity or experience that is unique to you these are often the things that will make you stand out and help a potential employer not only remember you, but connect with you as well. If you do have experience to fill into this section of your CV, format it the same way you did for your education. In this section, the four details you must The Art of Professional Storytelling: CV Building for Physicians 179 WWW.PHYSICIANCAREERPLANNING.COM