Your CV (week 3 of 8)

In the third instalment of this blog, I cover the area of CV preparation, writing and presentation. For the historical diversion, I've included references to two key figures from the history of psychiatry, with widely differing views on certain things. 

The curriculum vitae (CV) is, in theory at least, the ultimate record of all the history and development of your career to date. It can be thought of as a detailed passport or medical autobiography. While every doctor has had high points and low points in their medical career, your CV should paint you in the best possible light and should be the most positive and coherent representation of where you've come from, where you're at right now and where you plan to be in the immediate and longer term future. Your CV should also demonstrate how there has always been a seamless transition from one stage of your career to the next and an overarching grand plan (even if you were never consciously aware of such a grand plan until you sat down to write your CV).

Your CV should be comprehensive but focused and well written, with an easy to follow layout, structure, style and flow from beginning to end. It should take the reader on an interesting journey, providing a coherent story of your origins and how you got to where you are right now. There should be a logical and coherent narrative that demonstrates your progress through the various steps of your medical career to date.

While there are 15 sections outlined below, I tend to think of the five main pillars in a medical career as follows: clinical experience; teaching experience; research and audit; management and leadership experience; formal qualifications. 

Your CV should be kept in an easily accessible electronic file and it should be updated frequently, ideally every month. This means that your CV is a live and detailed document and it can be shared at short notice if required with colleagues or potential new employers. Leaving a CV untouched for even a year leads to a stale document that lacks updated information and provides only a snapshot of your career from a previous perspective. A useful way to motivate yourself to keep your CV updated is to imagine that you will have an interview for a dream job in a week or two and you have to have your CV ready in advance.

I would advise that you start your CV as early as possible in the very first post of your career and keep it as a live document that you are constantly updating. You should set aside some time every month at least to update your CV. Ideally, whenever you have done something noteworthy e.g. set up a new clinical initiative, presented a poster, given a lecture or completed an audit, you should input that information into your CV. When reviewing your CV, a key question to ask yourself is whether you think your CV would be ready in its current state to be shared with a senior colleague or a potential employer. If the CV is not ready for this, then you need to work more on updating the content, editing and improving the format.

For those who don't have English as their first language, it's always useful to get editing help from a colleague who does speak English as their first language. Native English speakers will use current and recognizable idioms and will pick up on any linguistic or grammatical errors. Regarding the language style, it is advisable to use ‘I’ as far as possible, and to paint a picture of you taking control and initiative and driving various projects and phases of your career.

It's also useful to have both a ‘long’ and ‘short’ version of the CV. The long version contains all necessary detail and may run to 20 or 30 pages. The short version is a 2-3 page summary with the key points only. The short version may be required in certain situations such as applications for research grants and it may also be useful when e.g. asked to provide a brief biography for a conference programme at which you are presenting.

It’s also very useful to look at the CVs of senior colleagues to get an idea as to how they have progressed through the ranks of medical training and reached their current positions. It’s possible to do simple google searches and obtain the CVs or at least the list of research publications of nationally and internationally renowned Psychiatrists and these should also act as useful guides as you set out on your career with a blank CV.

And now a brief historical diversion:

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) founder of psychoanalysis and someone whose CV may have looked somewhat haphazard, as he started off working in the area of neuropathology

The structure of your CV can be outlined as follows:

1.     Title page.

This should contain the ‘Curriculum Vitae’ heading with your name, qualifications, personal circumstances and contact details below.

2.     Contents

This is a table with a list of the key headings under which the CV is structured. Software packages such as Microsoft Word have a facility for automatically updating this contents list in a table form as the document is changed over time.

3.     Opening statement

This should be a 2-3 sentence statement outlining briefly your current career position, how you arrived at this point and your immediate and longer term plans for your future career. While this is an aspirational statement, try not to be too ‘Miss World’ in your ambitions, i.e. you may plan to develop mental health services in your region of Ireland and do some clinical research but you're unlikely to be able to deal with world poverty, hunger and nuclear disarmament.

4.     Current appointment

This is a brief description of your current post, including your clinical role and responsibilities and relevant key points relating to teaching, research, audit, management, leadership initiatives and current examinations or postgraduate studies in which you are engaged.

5.     Previous appointments

From your current position, work backwards, listing your previous posts to date. As with point 4 above, give only brief and focused descriptions of your clinical role and responsibilities and relevant key points relating to teaching, research, audit, management, leadership initiatives and examinations or postgraduate studies. There should be a clear and logical connection between the posts, even if some of your career moves have been completely random and unplanned. If there was a seeming ‘knight’s move’ change in your career (e.g. moving from Cardiothoracic Surgery to Child Psychiatry) then it may be best to address this in the CV and highlight what you learned and brought from a previous phase of your career to where you're at now.

Any gaps in your CV should also be addressed and explained as potential interviewers will latch on to such gaps in an effort to ensure you haven't taken time out to e.g. serve a jail sentence or work as a drug dealer.

6.     Clinical experience (this will be covered in more detail in the next blog)

This section provides a summary and overview of your experience in the clinical posts listed in sections 4 and 5 above. You should attempt to summarize the main areas of clinical experience, listing the specialty areas and clinical contexts in which you have worked. Again, there should be a logical flow to this section, taking the reader from your earliest clinical experience through subsequent posts in a seamless fashion that illustrates an overarching plan and constant progress towards an ultimate goal. For each post, try and emphasize how you took on leadership roles in developing clinical services and improving patient care, along with some key learning and personal development points. You should avoid getting too bogged down in detail for this section. For example, there is no need to include the number of new and return patient clinics or the frequency of your on-call duties for every post from Internship onwards.

7.     Research (this will also be covered in more detail in a later blog)

My own anecdotal and completely unscientific research suggests that the most common phrase uttered by NCHDs when it comes to this part of the CV is ‘I have done NO research’. Therefore, for most people, this is the section of the CV that causes the most anxiety. Trainees often believe that a gap or relative gap in this section is a major weakness that must be addressed as a priority, with a hurried effort to ‘get some research done’.

However, while some experience of clinical research is helpful for overall career development, it has been my experience that research achievements rank low down in the priority list for interviewers for standard Consultant posts, although there will obviously be much more emphasis on your research record if you are applying for a senior academic post.

For any research in which you have been involved, make sure to emphasize the ultimate outputs and remember the maxim ‘no research without action; no action without research’. Outputs should include academic products such as posters, oral presentations, papers, grant applications and grant awards. You should be able to highlight the clinical relevance of your research and how it has helped to improve patient care and clinical services. Finally, you should describe briefly how your research may have helped in the development of your clinical skills and everyday practice. For example, you may have used diagnostic tools or questionnaires in your data collection that have proven useful in your clinical practice.

8.     Audit

Whether you are a CPsychI Trainee, on a PDP-SS or working at Consultant level, there is an expectation that you perform regular clinical audits, generally on a yearly basis. I would advise that you keep the scope of these audits at a manageable level and within a clearly defined timetable. Ideally, your audits should be based on your everyday clinical work, to ensure that the work is clinically relevant to your practice and to reduce the amount of duplication involved in doing clinical work and then auditing your work separately. The quality of your audit should also be presentable as a poster or oral presentation at an academic meeting and presenting your findings at meetings is a good way of making the most of what is often a tedious and dreary process. Furthermore, the more audit findings you present, the better your chances of beefing up section 9 and 13 (see below) of your CV.

9.     Publications

Any publications should be listed here, with the full details of authors and your name highlighted in bold, the article title and journal details. If you have a long list of publications, then they can be grouped into publications in peer reviewed journals and publications in non-peer reviewed journals or maybe grouped into different research themes and projects in which you've been involved. Poster and oral presentations can also be included here as separate sections, especially if they have been published as abstracts in the programme of the relevant conference.

10.  Teaching

If you have held a formal teaching role with undergraduate medical students, then emphasize here your key roles and responsibilities and how the experience has helped with your overall career development, e.g. helping your communication skills and helping you keep abreast of new developments in Psychiatry. Even if you haven't held a formal teaching role, it's likely that you will have had at least some contact with medical students and students from other disciplines on clinical attachments or in delivering occasional lectures and tutorials. Again, emphasize this experience and how it has helped your development as a Psychiatrist, in terms of communication skills and in discussing and explaining issues to colleagues from other disciplines and even in your dealings with patients and their families. 

11.  Management and leadership

Experience of management and leadership begins from the earliest days of your career. From your early years as a Trainee you can highlight any work you may have taken on as e.g. NCHD Representative for your group and how in that role you were able to improve working conditions for your colleagues, leading ultimately to better standards of care for patients. You may have had the (unenviable) task of drawing up the NCHD on-call rota. This particular role frequently leads to clashes and difficulties. You can briefly highlight how you dealt with such challenges (and how there was always a positive outcome that reflected well on you and from which you were able to learn and develop, even if this was not always exactly the case).

Management and leadership skills become more important as you progress through your career, especially at HST and Consultant level. Any key developments and initiatives that you have led out or been involved in should be listed, including details on how they impacted positively on patient care and how such experiences made you a better clinician, manager and leader in the long term. For example, you may have reduced waiting lists for new patient assessments at your service. You can describe briefly how you delivered this change, the positive impacts for patient care, how it helped your professional development and, ideally, how your initiative can be extended to other healthcare settings and your future roles.

12.  Qualifications

This section should involve a list in reverse chronological order of your formal qualifications, back to your primary medical or other degrees. You may include a sentence or two on the importance of each qualification and how it helped you progress from one stage of your career to the next.

13.  Prizes

I have a few key points to make about prizes. Firstly, it's likely that some prizes in Psychiatry go unclaimed due to a lack of interest. While poster and oral presentation prizes at conferences are well subscribed and competitive, there are a number of essay prizes run by the CPsychI and RCPsych that have few submissions. Therefore, I would advise that you familiarize yourself with what's on offer and make submissions, as you may be the only entrant. Secondly, if you do win a prize, make sure to emphasize it and provide a description of what it entailed and how it has helped your career development.

14.  Other information

Include here any interesting and/or unique personal interests, skills or achievements, even if they don’t seem extraordinary to you, e.g. the number of languages you can speak fluently, interests in the arts and humanities (always relevant to Psychiatry and of interest to Psychiatrist interviewers) and activities that demonstrate perseverance, conscientiousness and healthy living (e.g. long distance running, mountain climbing, etc.). Try and avoid using the clichéd ones such as ‘travel’ and ‘reading’.

15.  Referees

Consider including references from different phases of your career and from different countries if you have had international experience. It's also worth considering asking for references from individuals who are not working in the medical profession, e.g. allied healthcare professionals in organizations with which you've had indirect contact as a result of any initiatives you may have developed. For example, I have done some voluntary and fundraising work with the Alzheimer's Society of Ireland and I have included one of their officers as a referee in my CV. Most importantly, make sure to first ask your referees if they would like to be included in your CV. This gives a potential referee the option of politely refusing, which may be a better outcome for you than receiving a lukewarm or negative reference. Furthermore, being asked by an employing authority to provide a reference for someone who has not already asked you directly themselves can be irritating and again lead to a less than effusive reference. 

And finally, a more recent historical figure:

Anthony Clare (1942-2007), Psychiatrist, writer, broadcaster. In contrast to the gentleman pictured at the start of this blog entry, Professor Clare famously referred to psychoanalysis as 'the most stupendous confidence trick of the century'. 

So that's the CV done. 

For next week's blog, I will be covering the area of clinical experience.