Finding Opportunities

The most likely website you will visit to find jobs are NHS Jobs, BMJ Careers, UK MMC and, for posts in Wales:The Smart Choice. They will have information on vacanciesand application processes for both training posts and wider NHS posts. However, this is just part of a broader approach to seeking suitable career opportunity. This is what everybody else will do. If you want to adopt a more tactical approach to job-search, it helps to understand a few things about looking for jobs.

There are three types of vacancy:

• Those which already exist – e.g. someone has been promoted or left
• Those which are about to exist – e.g. a recruitment round is coming up for open competition into a round of posts, a unit is expanding
• Those which are created – because your approach convinces an organisation that you have skills they need

There are two ways of job searching:

• Reactive - You research live vacancies in papers, on websites and in professional journals. You focus your activity within the “open market”.
• Proactive - You combine your investigative and entrepreneurial skills to anticipate vacancies, discover unseen opportunity or raise your visibility within the areas or organisations you are interested in. You are then more likely to be better prepared and better informed about vacancies and options when the time comes for open competition. In some situations, this can alert you to roles which exist or may be arising via the “hidden market”.

Examples of Proactive Job Search

• Conduct some research about potential employers e.g. create a “favourites” list of Deanery jobsites
• Visit medical careers fairs, find out what’s going on
• Talk to consultants on your specialty or look at Royal College careers information – what are the trends in this specialty, what is changing/will change, what sort of skills will be needed in the future?
• Build professional networks, carry out informational interviews (see frameworks for this on the Windmills website)
• Identify potential employers and write to a named person asking about future opportunity
• Write speculative letters to agencies/recruitment consultants