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LENGTH
OF THE CONSULTANT CV
Size
is always a contentious issue. Whereas, in normal business CVs,
the maximum recommended size is 2 to 3 pages, in medicine this
is simply not possible, the main reason being that for some
candidates the list of publications and courses is simply too
long to fit in a small number of pages.
On average, a consultant's CV for a medical speciality
will be approximately 10 pages long, whilst for a surgical
specialty it may go on for 15 pages or more.
Some candidates are interpreting this as meaning that their can
go on for as long as is needed, but one should always bear in
mind that a CV is a communication document designed to get you
short-listed. It is therefore essential that the information is
presented in a meaningful, well-ordered and concise
fashion.
Whatever information is contained in your CV, the important
information should be contained within the first 5 pages if
possible.
general
CONSULTANT cv format
The format for a medical CV for a consultant post is generally as follows:
PERSONAL DETAILS
-
Do not fill most of the
first page with personal details. Your name, address and
various contact details should be able to fit at the top of
the fist page over 4 or 5 lines (like headed paper). At a
push, no more than one-third of the front page should be
taken by personal details.
-
Stick to the essentials. For
example, there is no need to mention your Hep B immunisation
status (as many people do). Your status will be checked when
you start your new job. If you are not immunised,
Occupational Health will soon sort you out. Similarly,
although your driving licence status, your MDU membership
number, your marital status and number of children may be
interesting facts, they are best kept for a "Miscellaneous"
section at the back of the CV as they will not directly
affect your employment (unless you have been banned from
driving in which case you may choose to keep this fact
quiet)
-
Having a short Personal Details
section on the front page will ensure that you start
describing your education and current employment on the
first page or the beginning of the second page, where they
are most accessible. Include:
- Name (Make sure it matches your GMC registration name)
- Address
- GMC registration number
- Date of entry to Specialist Register & NTN
- Date of birth (not essential if
you are older than the "norm")
- Telephone numbers (not too many - your CV is not a telephone
directory
- Email address - avoid casual addresses such as karmaqueen@xxxxx.com
or
superdoctor@xxxxxx.co.uk [Yes, some people do put these on their
CVs ...]
CAREER AIM
-
This should be no more than 20
lines. No recruiter will read beyond that length. Instead
they will seek to explore this area further during the
interview.
-
This section (provided it is
short and to the point) is best placed at the front of the
CV as the content constitutes an important part of your
motivation to apply for the job. Placing it after a long
list of audits, publications and courses will almost ensure
that it does not get read at all.
-
It is worth spending some time
on your career aims as they can be helpful is projecting a
proactive and dynamic image of yourself at the start of the
CV. A good career aims section can prompt your recruiters'
subconscience to read your CV in a more positive light than
they would otherwise have done.
-
Avoid simply writing "I want to
be a consultant etc". We know that already! Mention any
special interests that you are keen to develop (make sure it
will be possible in the post that you are applying for), any
service development that you want to become involved in, any
ambition on the academic front (e.g. research projects or
interests that you want to develop, any teaching involvement
and at what level). You can also discuss your managerial
ambitions. Be aware though that the career aim section will
need to be tailored to the job that you are applying for (no
point going on about research interests if the post does not
involve research) and that writing a good section will
therefore require some understanding and knowledge of the
job description.
-
Do not write your life story and
what a marvellous individual you are. There is no room for
waffle in a CV and it is not the place to sell your
interpersonal skills (this is for the interview. Stick to
facts and avoid any mention of communication, team playing
and other generic skills.
QUALIFICATIONS
-
List your qualifications in
reverse chronological order. Start from your medical
degrees (including any intercalated degree) - no one really
cares about A' Levels.
-
List relevant dates and
place of study
-
Include your CCT/CCST date
(unless you have already included it at the top).
-
List any qualifications you are
currently studying for (e.g. medical education degree)
PRIZES & AWARDS
This is fairly self-explanatory.
Make sure that you include the date of the awards, who granted
it and why is was granted. If you obtained a first prize for a
poster, it would be nice to know how any many people you
competed against. Avoid corny prizes such as Christmas quiz and
other meaningless prizes. It may be that you will need to repeat
some of this information later (for example, if you obtained a
first prize for a presentation, you may want to repeat it in the
presentation section), but this does not matter; having the
prize on the first page will create a good impression, and
repeating it later on will help placing it into context.
CURRENT APPOINTMENT
If you are currently doing a locum
consultant post or are working as an associate specialist, then
it may be worth isolating your current post from the rest of
your training. This will give it more weight.
PAST APPOINTMENTS
For all your jobs, you should
provide:
-
Dates: no need to give the exact
day on which your started and ended the post; the month and
year will be sufficient.
-
Job title and
specialty/subspecialty
-
Hospital name (avoid giving the
full name of the trust; this is not a legal document, but a
document designed to give an idea of what you have done so
far).
-
Name of supervising consultant
Make sure that your jobs are listed
in reverse chronological order (i.e. going backwards in time).
They are more interested in your recent experience than you
House Officer posts or even your elective!
At consultant level, you should
avoid having a CV whereby each job's duties and responsibilities
are summarised under each heading. Since you are likely to have
done dozens of different attachments and posts, it will drag on
over many pages and it will make it difficult for the reader to
extract what they need to know. You should make the recruiters'
job easy by summarising the information in a way that they can
digest easily. We therefore suggest that at this stage, you only
list in a tabular format the jobs that you have done. Your
overall experience can then be summarised in a separate more
concise section. See next.
SUMMARY OF SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE
Your future employer will only
really be interested in what you have to offer, i.e. what you
can do now, and not what you did 10 years ago when you first
became an SHO. You should therefore find a way to summarise your
experience using appropriate headings.
Here are some examples of how you
can subdivide your experience (Note: these are only examples and
you will of course need to tailor your themes to the post that
you are applying for and to your own experience):
Paediatrics
Psychiatry
Obs & Gynae (example 1)
Obs & Gynae (Example 2)
-
Obstetrics
-
Gynaecology - clinics
-
Gynaecology - theatre
Cardiology
Anaesthetics
Under each heading, you need to
describe the extent of your experience and proficiency. For best
effect, you should follow a number of essential rules:
-
Use bullet points, not
sentences.
-
Use active wording such as
- "Gained
thorough experience of the management of patients with ...",
- "Confident
in...",
- "Perform
xxx independently...",
-
"Responsible for ...",
- "Proficient
in ..."
- "Played a
fundamental role in ..."
-
"Instrumental in ..."
- "Gained
exposure to ..."
-
Avoid personal statements such as "I really enjoyed this
post because it gave me the opportunity to ... etc". The
CV is designed to present facts. Its role is two-fold:
to get you short-listed and to provide talking points
for the interview. Keep your personal statements until
the interview, where you will be able to use them most
effectively.
-
If you are applying for a
surgical specialty, you should avoid listing all the
procedures that you have done. Instead it may be wiser to
include in the CV a summary of your log book. Ideally this
should fit one one page only. If it is longer than one page,
you should include it as an appendix to the CV (i.e. at the
end) so that it does not push the rest of the CV too far
back.
MANAGERIAL EXPERIENCE
This
should include any experience of managing people and resources,
including:
-
Designing rotas
-
Leading projects such as audits
or research
-
Designing and implementing
teaching programmes
-
Representing colleagues on
committees (e.g. clinical governance or other team meetings)
-
Deriving and implementing new
guidelines
-
Involvement in recruitment
(though simply sitting on interview panels is not really a
managerial activity).
If you want, you can include
experience outside of medicine, though you should place it at
the end. You might actually want to split this section between
"Medical" and "Non-medical".
You can also include any management
courses or events that you attended. Note: this information may
be repeated in the courses section, but this does not matter.
Repetitions are acceptable provided they are not concerning a
huge amount of information and provided they serve a purpose (in
this case, presenting a complete picture of your management
experience without getting the recruiters to cross-reference the
information for themselves).
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
-
Include all formal and informal
teaching done. Mention the type of audiences that you have
taught (juniors, peers, nurses, GPs) as well as some of the
key topics. Naming topics helps being credibility to your
answer.
-
One of the aspects that they
will be looking for is an awareness of a range of teaching
methods. You should ensure that you mention the various
methods that you used (bedside teaching, formal lectures
using PowerPoint, informal/formal supervision, videos, etc).
-
Mention any formal training
received and courses attended.
-
If patient education is a big
part of your job, then it may be worth mentioning your
experience of it in the teaching section.
AUDITS
-
List the title and date of
the audit in reverse chronological order.
-
For each audit you should
provide a short summary, providing the aim of the audit, your role, the conclusions drawn and actions
taken as a result (2-3 bullet points, 5 or 6 lines
maximum).
RESEARCH
Indicate the year of each project, quote the title of your
research and provide a short description of your role in bullet points format.
Present the information in reverse chronological order.
PUBLICATIONS
-
Make sure you are telling
the entire truth (including your ranking on the authors
list). Interviewers have been known to check the
database in front of candidates at the interview.
-
Present your publications in a
tabular format, in reverse chronological order. List the
title, authors and relevant dates. Ideally, you should place
the year in the left hand margin and the rest of the
information on the right.
-
Many candidates present their
publications in the conventional manner i.e. with the
authors first, followed by the title of the publication and
then the journal. If you follow this approach, the titles
will be all over the place on the page (since the title
starts after the list of authors) and this may make it
difficult for the recruiters to see exactly what you have
written on. You may thus wish to adopt a different listing
approach, with the title coming first, followed by the
authors and the journal. To make the information even more
readable, you may even wish to present each element on a
different line (i.e. title on one line, authors on the next
line and journal on a third line).
-
Your publications should be
listed in reverse chronological order i.e. most recent
first. This will ensure that the most interesting
information is seen first. If you have a substantial number
of publications and you feel that the list is just too long,
you should try to weed out some of the less interesting
papers/cases. Remember that the CV is designed to achieve a
purpose, which is to get you short-listed. It is not
necessarily an entire biography. If the content gets in the
way of readability then get rid of some of the less
interesting stuff.
-
To improve readability, you may
wish to separate your publications in relevant categories
(e.g. peer-reviewed papers, abstracts, case reports, book
chapters, etc)
PRESENTATIONS
-
List the dates (year, month will
suffice), the titles and authors. This should be presented
in a tabular format to improve readability.
-
If you obtained any prizes or
awards, mention them under the appropriate presentation.
-
If you can, try to separate your
presentations in different types (assuming you have enough
of each type to do this) such as: international, regional,
local.
COURSES & MEETINGS
Courses and meetings normally
feature straight after the clinical experience in an SHO's or
SpR's CV. For consultants however, this information is not as
important as the rest and it is therefore acceptable to place it
towards the end of the CV (It means that your recruiters do not
have to read through pages of courses before they can get to
your managerial experience).
-
For each course, show the date,
title of the course and organising institution.
-
Present the information in a
tabular format.
-
Make sure that you mention the
organiser as opposed to the place where the training took
place.
-
As well as clinical courses,
included management, research and teaching courses.
-
Leave out all courses which
relate to exam preparation; it adds no value.
COMPUTER / IT SKILLS
-
Include all relevant
basic software e.g. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher,
Internet.
-
If you can use digital photo
manipulation software or have experience of web design you
can mention it here too.
-
Include all specialist software
(statistics pacakges, reference managers etc).
-
Include databases that you
frequently search for literature searches.
-
Do not mention skills that you
have no real experience of if your experience is only basic
and at hobby level. For example, "Can use Corel" would only
make sense if you are actually proficient at using it, but
not if you only use it to view your holiday snaps!
LANGUAGE SKILLS & SPECIAL
INTERESTS
-
By any means state the
languages that you can speak if in small number as well
as your degree of fluency (e.g. German - basic, French -
conversational). If you speak several
dialects due to your ethnic origin, it is best to place
them under an umbrella definition (e.g. fluent in 7
Indian dialects ) rather than list them all separately.
-
Mention any involvement in
voluntary work and list your hobbies. There is no need to
find fancy hobbies to sound interesting. Spending time with
your children makes you sound more "normal" than climbing
Mount Everest every week-end!
-
Strike the right balance
between group activities and lonely activities
-
"Having fun" is not a
personal interest as far as CVs are concerned. Nor is
"Drinking with mates".
MISCELLANEOUS
-
This section can be used
for information in which you feel the interviewer may
have an interest but that does not have major importance
as far as your eligibility for the job is concerned
(e.g. driving licence, marital status & number of
children, etc). You should keep this section to the bare
minimum.
-
You might also want to include
your memberships of various institutions (though some prefer
to place these in a separate section.
REFERENCES
No more than three unless
otherwise requested. Provide their name, job title,
correspondence address, telephone number, fax number and email
address.
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