Download this plan as a .pdf file.

Do you know what you want to be doing in five years’ time? You should. A carefully crafted career plan can show you the way forward, especially if your job is stuck in the doldrums and you lack inspiration to change it. The most successful plans are based on honest self-analysis: take time out to appraise your ambitions, experience and skills, and then draft a dynamic new CV.

Career plans

1. Have a career plan – however simple – if only to judge whether you are on target. Most of us have some kind of a plan, even if it’s only in our heads. Try committing yours to paper to see what it looks like.
2. Goals don’t need to be job-specific – fine if your ambition is to “be an astronaut” but not everyone is so definite. Don’t be put off expressing less explicit goals, such as ‘quality: of life and work experience’, or ‘variety: a wide portfolio of managerial skills and experience’.
3. Review your career plan regularly and set yourself fresh objectives: pin point contacts, competencies and knowledge you need to acquire, and roles to investigate further.
4. Make your plan realistic and effective:
   • Indulge in introspective and retrospection to unearth your values, explore what ‘makes you tick’, the skills you have honed, the places and people you like to work with. All this will be useful material when writing your CV later.
   • Anticipate what will be happening two to five years from now – to your profession, your organisation, your home circumstances and the world around you. Changes in these areas can help fulfill your ambitions, or inhibit them.
   • Strike a healthy life-work balance – position your plan in the context of your life and wider ambitions: each can play off the other and help or hinder you.
5. Keep a generic CV up and running on your computer. Update it regularly and overhaul it every two or three jobs, it should show your growing competencies and echo your career plan. Use it to build networks and be ready for relevant jobs when they come up.
6. Think twice before posting off your application. If done well the selection process will take up a lot of your time and energy. Does this position further your ambition, even by an indirect route?
7. Find out if you’re suited to the role by gathering plenty of intelligence on your prospective employer (including the organisation, department and team). Use your networks, as well as the employers adverts, job specs, websites and publicity material. What do they really want? What are they really like? Check if the job suits your career plan – and say so in your application.
8. Exploit (and time) your call to ‘discuss the post further’. Show you are well informed, ask pre-prepared questions to gain more insight, and market yourself by putting across a strong personal profile.
9. Make it easy for the short-listing panel to select you: tailor your CV to their requirements. Using the job description and person specification:
   • shape and structure the content. Move your most significant achievements to the front of each section. Be ruthless: edit out all irrelevant information.
   • Top your CV with a dynamic personal profile (a four or five line summary about you, your areas of expertise and career direction) and make it pertinent to the position.
10. Persuade some critical friends or colleagues to appraise your CV. Remembering the likely competition or the job, put yourself in the employers shoes – what kind of CV would impress you?

CV style file

• Choose and appropriate format: show your career progression by adopting a traditional chronological style, or highlight your transferable skills by using a skills-based format (list, with examples, your key skills aligning them to the employer’s requirements: then briefly add your career summary).
• Take care with layout, spacing and headings – be consistent.
• Pitch the wording at the readership and ban jargon, especially technical terms and abbreviations which may not be understood.
• Quantify your achievement showing the results – size of budgets, number of staff, etc.
• Be succinct.
• Read your finished CV aloud to see if it makes sense.
• Finally, triple check grammar and spellings – don’t rely on spell-checks, and take special care with names.

Originally published in the Health Management Journal in 2002.

An article in Health Management earlier this year assessed some of the implications of becoming an independent consultant. But what does it mean in practice? What are some of the pitfalls you should be aware of? Here we outline some tips for those contemplating the move based on our own experiences.

No more the financial security of a regular monthly pay cheque. Overnight, income becomes contract-based and variable. Before starting out, review your personal lifestyle and budget. Focus on essentials, reduce personal overheads, pay off loans and decrease the mortgage. Any NHS ‘package’ should be put to good use. Consider part-time employment (without compromising your availability for contracts) while business builds. Keep six months’ living costs reserve as a buffer.

How easy it was to taker infrastructure for granted. Now you must develop and maintain your own business and office base. Organise travel routes to incorporate banking, buying stationery and equipment (resisting the seductive, glossy brochures) and visits to your accountant. Build in time for book-keeping, getting quotes for professional indemnity and office insurance and seeking out and writing proposals for new work. Techno-nightmares (your system corrupts tomorrow’s Powerpoint presentation, a fault cuts off the phone, email and fax) will cause you to revoke your criticism of the IM&T Help Desk.

Once an organisation animal, now you must tackle the isolation of independence and the challenge of being ‘home alone’, perhaps for several days. With whom do you bandy ideas, obtain sanity checks or find creativity for your proposals and projects? Where is the social chat that lifts your mood, provides interest or brings fresh perspective? Office interruptions give way to domestic distractions if based at home. A good network of business and NHS colleagues, a supportive partner and family, a well-planned and varied diary will help, but strong self-discipline and determination must underpin all.

No longer part of the NHS, your former colleagues’ perceptions of you will shift. Some will use the resource you offer, a few may be envious or suspicious – inevitably, all will become more distant. You find yourself on the outside, looking in. While disturbing at first, the time and self-assurance, you will adapt. Use your new objectivity and maintain your networks by doing most of the running. Exchange your external view-point learning and experience for new information and knowledge of the Service.

Your move to independence may reflect a wish for more control of work and increased quality of life. Yet, just as work never arrives in a steady stream, so customers and contracts ‘ebb and flow’. A single, large project offers security but limits flexibility in attracting new work. Smaller contracts provide less security, but a great deal of variety. Achieving a ‘mixed portfolio’ of work is ideal – but requires you to balance the demands of various clients’ deadlines. Planning for and allowing time to acquire new business is essential. Building in vacation and training time is a risk. Turn down a contract in haste – repent at leisure.

Going solo, how will you obtain sufficient work on a regular basis? The NHS changes. Former colleagues move on. Contracts become hard to maintain. Over time, you will not be able to trade on your original reputation. Larger projects must be tendered for. Tendering, a skill in its own right, is time consuming and de-motivating if unsuccessful. Continually build your reputation through assignments and proactive networking. Explore options to become an associate with an established consultancy, they are experienced in tendering and more resilient. Create a network with other independent consultants with complimentary skills, in complementary sectors – or those in similar fields. Bouncing ideas off one another can lead to sub-contracting or joint-tendering. While the network can be as formal as you like, trust and some ground-rules will be needed. However, the reputation of established consultancies may still prove overwhelming.

Plan ahead. Allow extra time and resources for each job. Network to supplement your resources. Cope with the challenges and generate the work. As an independent, nothing is quite as high as the highs you will experience. Good luck!

Originally published in Health Management Journal Nov 2001