Career and Life Planning Guidebook for Medical Residents

R E A D : Determining the Weights of the Objectives We now determine each objective’s relative importance. We codify their importance using the concepts of weights, which are values between 0 and 1 and which always sum to 1.00. For example, if you have just two objectives: Maximize Compensation and Minimize Stress with weights 0.75 and 0.25 respectively, then Maximizing Compensation is three times more important than Minimizing Stress because 0.75 is three times 0.25. Wewillbeusing themethodcalledSwingWeighting to determine the weights and demonstrate with an example. First, we show how to determine the weights of John’s second-level objectives in Figure 1. The weights for the lower levels are calculated in a similar fashion. Swing weighting starts with creating a table as shown in Table 1. In the first column, start with “Benchmark,” explained below, and then list all the objectives for which we are determining weights. In the second column, we create hypothetical job offers for John to consider. The first hypothetical offer is called the Benchmark and is defined as the worst value for each objective among your actual job offers. As shown in Table 1, the Benchmark is a job with the worst Stress, worst Learning, worst Influence over Decisions, and worst Financial Stability. Next, move down one row to Neg Stress. Here we create a second hypothetical example that exactly matches the Benchmark, except for Neg Stress, which we now define to be the best value among our actual job offers. By allowing Neg Stress to swing from worst to best while keeping everything else fixed, we can accurately determine the relative importance to John of Neg Stress. Finish the second column off by allowing each objective to swing from its current worst to its current best value. See Table 1. SECTION II: T MINUS TWO YEARS CAREER AND LIFE PLANNING GUIDEBOOK FOR MEDICAL RESIDENTS 278