Medical training begins from med school and ends when you complete your fellowship. However, as a medical professional, continuously learning and developing your skills is the key to true leadership.
For effectively learning to take place in later life, you need to set the right tone from the onset. Here’s how.
Nail Your CV
Scoring a residency is all about standing out in your curriculum vitae (CV) by effectively promoting your strengths. Here’s how you can pique your program director’s interest and become a serious contender for the position.
1. Be Consistent
A regular CV usually starts with your contact information, followed by:
- Personal details
- Academic history
- Job experience
- Awards and achievements.
- Skills, hobbies, and extra-curriculars.
- References
No matter what order you follow, make sure you’re keeping everything chronologically consistent. For instance, if you’re listing your education in descending order, you must follow the same order when listing job experience.
2. Keep it Short
Be brief when describing your accolades and achievements. State the facts, avoid giving your opinion, and keep out anything not relevant to your residency.
3. Add a Bibliography
If you’re listing publications, you must add a footnote and support them with bibliographic entries, so the reader doesn’t have to search for them on Google.
Adopt a Symbiotic Approach to Learning
Peer-assisted learning (PAL) is a reciprocal approach to learning in which equally or almost equally matched peers try to reach their learning goals by establishing a tutor-tutee dynamic.
The evaluation of a series of peer-taught tutorials held across a course of eight years revealed surprisingly good progress on the part of peer tutors and their fellow peers and pupils. Both parties seem to have benefitted through peer-teaching. This could be due to several factors, such as:
- Equal cognitive competence.
- Social congruence
- Less time on the tutor’s part between information learned and taught.
- The empathetic upper hand from having been in the same shoes not long ago.
Be an Empathetic Mentor
The knowledge you’re acquiring at present will probably become obsolete by the time you start clinical practice. Thus, your future pupils may face learning problems that are different from the ones you’re facing right now.
However, by taking the peer-to-peer approach to learning, you can grow up to be a mentor who can understand the pupils’ learning difficulties on their level rather than your own.
Evolve Into a Leader
A peer-to-peer approach to learning has everything you need to be a leader in your field. It teaches you to take the initiative instead of depending on a tutor to solve your quandaries.
Once you get the hang of solving your problems by sharing them with your peers, you’ll feel empowered and motivated to reach your potential through hard work, shared responsibility, and community learning.
Adopt community learning and set just the right tone for medical professional development through The Doctor Connect. Find and share up-to-date cancer information for health professionals and uplifting personal stories on social media for doctors. Medical trainers can also read Dr. Liudmila Schafer’s Success Strategy to learn about cancer and mindset or subscribe to weekly educational videos and digital courses for the latest in cancer research.
Catch the healthcare professionals on TV.