Is a PGCert in Medical Education Worth It? My Experience as a Doctor and Clinical Teacher

• A PGCert is much more than a course in teaching techniques. It involves postgraduate academic study of areas such as learning theory, assessment, curriculum and educational practice, alongside applying those ideas to your own teaching.
• You do not need a PGCert to become a good clinical teacher. Practical teaching experience, feedback and reflection remain essential. The real question is how much formal educational training makes sense for the role you want teaching to play in your career.
• Expect a significant commitment. I spent around 10 hours a week on my PGCert, including reading, online activity and assignments, while continuing my clinical work.
• Starting early can make a big difference. I began the qualification during FY1 and completed it in just eight months, well before my IMT application, rather than trying to fit postgraduate study around an approaching recruitment deadline.
• A PGCert can contribute to a specialty application, but don't do one purely for points. Formal training in teaching methods and practical teaching experience may be assessed separately. Always check the current recruitment criteria before deciding what qualification you actually need.
• For many doctors, shorter practical training is a more proportionate starting point. That was my own route. I first attended a two-day teaching course before deciding that I wanted to explore medical education at postgraduate level.
• The biggest benefit may be how you think about teaching. For me, the PGCert shifted the starting point from “What do I want to teach?” towards “What does this learner need to be able to do afterwards?”, influencing how I plan sessions, structure learning and give feedback.

Teaching is part of working in medicine. Whether we formally think of ourselves as educators or not, most doctors will find themselves teaching medical students, junior colleagues, other healthcare professionals or patients throughout their careers. For some of us, however, education gradually becomes more than something we happen to do alongside clinical work. We start to become interested in how we teach, why some approaches work better than others and perhaps whether education might become a more significant part of our future career.

That happened relatively early for me. I was already gaining teaching experience and had completed a two-day Teach the Teacher course with ISC Medical when I decided to take my interest further and undertake a Postgraduate Certificate (PGCert) in Medical Education during my FY1 year. I subsequently completed the qualification at the University of Dundee.

There was also a practical consideration. I was thinking ahead to my application for Internal Medicine Training (IMT), where teaching achievements could contribute to my portfolio. The PGCert therefore potentially offered two things: a much deeper understanding of medical education and a formal qualification that could also be relevant to my future specialty application.

Having now completed it, I am very pleased that I did. But would I recommend that every doctor interested in teaching immediately signs up for a PGCert? No. And I think that distinction is important.

I was in my FY1 year when medical education started to interest me as something I wanted to keep doing throughout my career as a doctor, rather than simply an occasional part of the job.

By that stage, I already had experience of teaching medical students and coaching prospective applicants through ISC Medical. The practical teaching course I had completed had also given me a more structured introduction to thinking about how teaching is planned and delivered.

I found that useful because I could apply what I had learned directly to my own teaching. But it also made me more curious about medical education itself. I wanted to go beyond practical techniques and develop a deeper understanding of why different approaches work, how learning happens and how teaching and assessment can be designed more systematically.

Like many doctors, much of my early approach to teaching had come from instinct and from reproducing things that I had experienced myself as a learner. If somebody had explained something particularly well to me, it was natural to borrow elements of their approach when I came to teach somebody else.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with that. We learn a great deal about teaching through experience, both good and bad. But the more teaching I did, and the more I began to think about teaching as a skill in its own right, the more interested I became in understanding the educational thinking behind it.

I wanted to know why some approaches worked better than others. I wanted a more systematic understanding of learning, teaching, assessment and feedback, and I wanted to be able to connect what I was doing in practice with a stronger theoretical foundation.

For me, the PGCert therefore felt like a natural next stage in my development as an educator.

One of the important distinctions is that a PGCert is a postgraduate academic qualification. It is not simply an extended course in teaching techniques.

At Dundee, my PGCert was structured around three modules:

• Learning and Teaching
• The Principles of Assessment
• Clinical Teaching – STeM and Specialisms.

Together, these covered areas including learning theory, curriculum and session design, assessment design and standard setting, and applying educational principles within a clinical specialty teaching context.

There was also a significant academic component. Completing the qualification meant engaging with educational literature, analysing different ideas and then relating those ideas back to my own teaching practice. That was one of the biggest differences between undertaking a postgraduate qualification and attending a shorter practical teaching course. The latter is primarily concerned with helping you develop skills that you can use in your teaching. A PGCert goes considerably further. You begin to examine education itself and critically engage with the theory behind what you are doing.

That distinction became increasingly important to me. Rather than simply asking “What technique could I use here?”, I found myself thinking much more about why I was using a particular approach, what I wanted the learner to achieve and how I would know whether the teaching had demonstratably worked.

One of the most valuable parts of studying medical education formally was being encouraged to examine things I had previously taken for granted. Doctors spend years being taught. By the time we begin teaching others, we have experienced lectures, tutorials, bedside teaching, simulation, workplace assessments, feedback and examinations. It is very easy to assume that because we have spent so much time as learners, we naturally understand how to teach. But being a learner is not the same as understanding how learning happens.

The PGCert made me much more deliberate about what I want a learner to achieve and how the teaching activity itself supports that objective. One concrete example is feedback. Previously, it would have been easy to give somebody a fairly general impression of how something had gone. I now try to make feedback much more specific and tie it directly to what I wanted the learner to be able to do by the end of the session.

I have also changed how I structure teaching in the first place. Previously, I might have started with the content I wanted to cover and worked outwards from there. Now I am more likely to start with the learner:

• What do they need to be able to do afterwards?
• What do they already know?
• What approach is most likely to help them get there?

I can then think about how to structure the session, sometimes drawing on an educational framework such as Gagné's events, rather than simply working through content and hoping that a coherent structure emerges along the way.

The PGCert has also made me more conscious that a teaching approach that works well for one learner, group or objective will not necessarily work equally well somewhere else. There is rarely one universally “correct” teaching technique. Context matters.

Perhaps most importantly, it reinforced the idea that becoming a better teacher is an ongoing process. Completing a qualification does not mean that you have somehow finished learning how to teach. The challenge is continuing to apply, test and refine what you have learned in practice.

For me, the workload was roughly 10 hours a week, including reading, forum activity and assignment preparation. That is a significant amount of time alongside a clinical job, but with some planning I found it manageable.

I also did things slightly differently from the usual timetable. I started the PGCert early in FY1 and was keen to complete it well before my IMT application. Dundee University took some persuading to allow me to complete the programme in just eight months, and I had to demonstrate that I could make enough time for the work and maintain the required academic standard. It was an intensive approach, but it paid off: by the time I needed the qualification for my portfolio, it was already completed.

Of course, the commitment is not just the scheduled teaching. A PGCert involves independent reading, reflection, participation and academic assignments, all of which have to fit around clinical work, examinations and life outside medicine. There is a financial consideration too: postgraduate university study is considerably more expensive than a short teaching course.

So I would look at both time and cost before committing. I found the investment worthwhile because I genuinely wanted to study medical education in greater depth. If your main aim is simply to obtain evidence of formal training in teaching for a specialty application, however, it is worth checking the current recruitment criteria first. You may not need a PGCert to achieve that.

My future IMT application was certainly one consideration when I decided to undertake the PGCert, although it was not the main reason.

Specialty recruitment inevitably influences some of the decisions doctors make about their portfolios. If a particular achievement may be recognised within an application process, it is entirely reasonable to consider that when deciding where to invest your time.

The important thing is to understand exactly what the recruitment process is assessing.

Formal training in teaching methods may be considered separately from your actual teaching experience, how long you have been teaching or whether you have been involved in organising and developing teaching. A qualification therefore does not replace the need to actually teach.

This is one reason I would be cautious about undertaking a PGCert purely for application points.

If my only objective had been to obtain evidence of formal training in teaching methods, I would first have looked carefully at the current IMT criteria and established what was actually necessary. If shorter formal training met that particular requirement, undertaking an entire postgraduate qualification purely to obtain portfolio evidence would have been difficult to justify.

In my case, I had already undertaken practical training in teaching before starting the PGCert. My decision to progress further was therefore about something more than obtaining another piece of evidence for my portfolio. I wanted the deeper educational development that came with postgraduate study. Its potential relevance to my IMT application was an additional benefit.

I think that is an important distinction: do the qualification because the level of training makes sense for where you want to go professionally, while being aware of how it may also contribute to your specialty application.

My own experience also highlighted the importance of planning ahead. You can’t generally decide a few months before specialty applications that you would like a postgraduate qualification in medical education and expect to have it completed in time. Universities have enrolment dates, modules need to be completed and assignments have to be submitted and assessed. In my case, I had actually missed the September enrolment date and needed to wait until the following January.

If you want the qualification to be available as evidence for a particular recruitment round, work backwards from the application date. Look at when the achievement needs to have been completed, when the PGCert starts and how long the university says it will take.

I was fortunate in that I had decided to do mine early in FY1 and completed it within eight months. It was therefore finished comfortably before my IMT application rather than becoming another deadline competing for attention at the same time.

Recruitment criteria can change between application rounds as well, so always check the current official guidance for the specialty you are applying to rather than relying on what somebody received points for previously.

Definitely not. Holding a postgraduate qualification in medical education does not automatically make somebody an excellent clinical teacher, just as not having one does not mean somebody cannot teach extremely well.

Good teaching also develops through practice. You need opportunities to teach real learners, receive feedback, reflect on what worked, change your approach and then teach again. That practical experience matters enormously.

What formal educational training can do is give that experience a stronger foundation. Rather than relying entirely on instinct or reproducing the teaching methods you experienced yourself, you develop a framework for thinking about what you are doing and why.

For me, therefore, the question is not so much “Do doctors need a PGCert?” but “How much training in education is appropriate for the role I want teaching to play in my career?”. For many doctors, a shorter practical course may be enough. For others, their experience of teaching will spark an interest in education that makes further academic study worthwhile.

I do not really regard shorter practical teaching courses and a PGCert as competing alternatives because they serve different purposes. My own route was to undertake practical training first, apply what I had learned through teaching and then progress to a PGCert in Medical Education.

The shorter course gave me a practical grounding in teaching that I could start using immediately. The PGCert was a very different experience. It went considerably further into education as an academic discipline and required much more time, independent study and academic work. Rather than concentrating predominantly on how to teach effectively, it allowed me to explore learning, assessment and educational practice at much greater depth and engage critically with the theory behind them.

Having taken that route myself, for many doctors I would recommend starting with practical training and teaching experience before deciding whether you need a postgraduate qualification.

There is a practical reason for this. You can take what you have learned and actually use it: teach medical students, run a departmental session or become involved in an existing teaching programme. Ask learners for feedback, experiment with different approaches and reflect on what works. That allows you to build teaching experience at the same time as developing your skills.

It also gives you an opportunity to discover how important medical education is likely to become in your own career. You may find that teaching remains an enjoyable and important part of your clinical role and that the practical educational training you have received is entirely sufficient for what you want to do.

Alternatively, as happened with me, the experience may make you want to understand education at a deeper level. You may become interested not simply in delivering teaching, but in understanding learning, designing education, assessing learners or perhaps eventually developing other teachers. At that point, undertaking a PGCert can become a natural next step.

There is another advantage to this sequence. Educational theory becomes much more meaningful when you have genuine teaching experience to relate it to. Concepts around learning, assessment and feedback are no longer purely academic when you can connect them with real learners, teaching sessions and situations you have encountered yourself.

For me, the two stages therefore served different purposes. Practical training helped me develop as a teacher; the PGCert allowed me to explore medical education in much greater depth.

That is a definite yes! I wanted more than a certificate or a set of practical teaching techniques. I wanted a deeper understanding of medical education, and the PGCert gave me that. It has changed the way I plan teaching, the way I think about learners and the way I give feedback. It also provided a formal qualification that could contribute to my wider teaching portfolio as I prepared for IMT, although I would not have undertaken the PGCert for that reason alone.

If you are just beginning to develop as a teacher, my advice would be to start with practical training and experience. That was the route I took myself. I could apply what I had learned, gain more experience of teaching and then decide whether I wanted to explore medical education at a much deeper level.

Build a portfolio that demonstrates what you have actually done rather than simply accumulating certificates. Teach, seek feedback, reflect on what worked and gradually take on more responsibility if education is something you enjoy.

For some doctors, teaching will remain one rewarding element of clinical practice and there may never be a need to undertake a postgraduate qualification in education. For others, those early experiences will develop into a much greater professional interest, perhaps leading towards educational supervision, programme leadership or a wider career in medical education.

A PGCert is a significant investment of time, work and money. I think it is most valuable when you genuinely want the deeper learning that comes with it and have enough teaching experience to connect educational theory with the realities of clinical practice.

That was certainly the case for me, and I am pleased that I did it.

There are plenty of options if you are considering a PGCert in Medical Education, and it is worth comparing them rather than simply choosing the first programme you come across. More than 30 UK universities currently offer relevant postgraduate certificates, but there can be considerable differences in cost, duration, delivery and course content.

Many are designed specifically for healthcare professionals and can be studied online or predominantly online, which makes them much easier to combine with clinical work. Others include face-to-face teaching or are primarily campus-based. Most PGCerts comprise 60 postgraduate credits at Master's level, and many form the first stage of a longer PGDip or Master's programme if you later decide to continue your studies.

For example, current UK options include:

University	Typical PGCert format	Duration	Indicative UK fee*
University of Dundee	Online	Up to 24 months	£4,636
Cardiff University	Online	1 year	£4,700
University of Edinburgh	Online	1 year	£5,700
University of Manchester	Online	12 months	£5,000
King's College London	In person	1 year	£4,850
University of Warwick	In person	1 year	£5,640
Queen Mary University of London	Online or in person	9 months	£4,450
University of Aberdeen	Online	8 months	£4,180

*Indicative UK fees for 2026/27. Fees, course structures and delivery arrangements change, so always check the university's current information before applying.

Cost and convenience are not the only things I would look at. Course content matters, particularly if you already know which areas of medical education interest you. It is also worth looking at how the programme is assessed, how much interaction there is with tutors and other students, and whether you need to be actively involved in teaching while studying.

Accreditation may be relevant too. Some programmes are accredited by organisations such as the Academy of Medical Educators (AoME) or Advance HE, while others are not. This may be worth considering if you expect medical education to become a significant part of your career.

Finally, check whether the PGCert can be used as the first stage of a PGDip or Master's degree. You may have no intention of progressing further when you start, but having that option can be useful if your interest in medical education develops.

In my case, Dundee suited what I needed because I could study online alongside my clinical work. I ultimately completed the programme in eight months, although that was faster than its standard schedule and required agreement from the university.