Career and Life Planning Guidebook for Medical Residents

R E A D : Congratulations! You have built your Fundamental Objectives Hier- archy. It took quite a bit of self-reflection and thought about what is important to you and why it is important. The question is - now what? Now, you reap the rewards of your hard work! There are three ways to use the FOH to guide us in our decision making. The simplest one, which occurs quite often, is that the decision maker now knows which job offer is best. The process of constructing the FOH has added sufficient clarity that no further thought is required; it is clear to the decision maker their best course of action. The second way to use your FOH to choose among various job offers is to, more or less, ignore the actual offers and create your perfect job. The FOH tells you explicitly what is important to you. Using it as a template, you can define what job you would really like. How does this help you? First, it focuses your search on those possibilities that most fulfill your desires. Second, it forms the basis of any negotiations. As amatter of fact, modern negotiation theory borrows from Decision Analysis techniques to determine win-win situations. Having an intimate knowledge of what is important to you greatly aides in any negotiation. The third way to use the FOH is to numerically score each job offer. The scores will represent how much you value each job offer. For example, if you have four offers and their scores were 50, 53, 85, and 90 out of 100, then you know that the two lowest scores represent positions that are not attractive to you, especially in comparison to the offers with the highest scores. Unless you can negotiate these lower offers up, you would not be interested in them. Think of this step as using your objective data to help guide you in patient care decisions; compare your gut feeling to the hard information you have in front of you. What do the numbers/labs say? Having data to back you up in an uncomfortable setting always makes a complex decision more clear. How exactly do we compute these numerical scores?The score for any job offerwill be aweighted average of the form: 〖 weight〗 _1 〖 value〗 _1+〖 weight〗 _2 〖 value〗 _2+⋯ +〖 weight〗 _n 〖 value〗 _n where the values are determined by how well the job offer meets an objective. In this case, we have N objectives. The weights determine the relative importance of the objectives to one another and need to be carefully determined. Below, we discuss how to determine the score or value for each objective, then we turn to a rigorous procedure to determine the weights. Once completed, you will be able to score each job offer on how attractive it is to you personally. SECTION II: T MINUS TWO YEARS CAREER AND LIFE PLANNING GUIDEBOOK FOR MEDICAL RESIDENTS 276