Oct 21, 2015 | Ravi S. Hira, MD, FACC
Career Development

As Fall rolls around and you settle into your comfort zone with new responsibilities as a senior fellow, now would be a good time to plan your strategy for the next few months. Many of you may be considering advanced fellowships and more training, while others have decided to look for jobs. For those on the fence, I would suggest following through with the steps below and deciding after more specific details and options become available.

1. Curriculum Vitae (CV):
   First and foremost, irrespective of which direction you choose to go, you will need an update of your CV. We have all gone through the process before and while painful, it is necessary. There are several agencies and recruiting centers that can assist with professional editing services and most of them will do it free of charge.
2. Get online:
   I used quite a few websites for my job search. Some will also provide postings for advanced fellowships. Most of them have a tailored search function and options to set up daily/weekly emails regarding your search criteria. You can also upload your CV to these sites and have potential employers search for and contact you.
   • One of the premier websites for cardiology jobs is ACC.org and Cardiology Careers website where several options are available.
   • Other websites I used were: New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association Career Center, Indeed.com, Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (for academic positions), USAJobs.gov (for opportunities at the VA), HEALTHecareers.com, doccafe.com, practicelink.com.
   While this list is by no means exhaustive, it served to get me in touch with recruiters and administrators across a wide range of practices.
3. Networking:
   If your search is limited to a certain geographic location, a consideration would be to cold call/email hospital recruiters or practice administrators in that area. Job searches are expensive undertakings for them and having someone (with potential ties to the area) come to them may be their best bet. Also, as I mentioned in an earlier post, device and drug company representatives have a wide network across the country and can forward your CV along to the local representatives in the area.
   
   If you are looking for jobs based on other criteria, I would suggest emailing your CV to attendings, colleagues and contacts who can forward it to their friends and colleagues at institutions where you are trying to work. You could also reach out directly to potential mentors and seek advanced training and mentorship with unique options available at certain institutions.
   
   Going to meetings and training courses is another great opportunity to get some one-on-one time with mentors and practices you are looking to work with. The ACC and others have also organized career fairs during meetings to streamline the process for FITs looking for jobs.
4. Recruiters:
   This is another potential resource, however, in my experience the yield was low. Hospital recruiters work directly for the hospital and will usually find your CV online on one of the websites and contact you regarding a position they need to fill. There are also other recruiters who work for recruiting agencies – they function as middle men and women trying to put potential employers in touch with potential employees. By nature, it's a hit or miss situation and you may not feel that it is worth your time.

Once again, we hope this information assists in your search. Please get back to us with any questions or suggestions you may have. Next month we plan to have a guest piece by Marat Yanavitski, MD, on innovative careers in cardiology.

This post is part of a series focused on career development for fellows in training (FITs), authored by Ravi S. Hira, MD, FACC, Assistant Professor, Division of Cardiology, University of Washington, Seattle, and Payal Kohli, MD, Attending Cardiologist at Kaiser Permanente, Denver, CO.