Your job should offer a sense of satisfaction and should reassure you that you made the right decision about your profession. Otherwise, you will face regular dissatisfaction and an inability to feel content with your job. Consider something new if you’re feeling unfulfilled in your current situation.
Coming to the Decision of Changing your Current Job
Balancing work and life for medical professionals can be a gradual journey. Most graduate medical students are trained for the discipline they want to specialize in, thus generally their career trajectory after graduation is evident. Each stage of your professional life is an opportunity to learn more about your talents, interests, and challenges. Practitioners may realize their jobs aren’t a perfect match for their personalities after getting to know themselves better. At this point, they may feel dissatisfied with their current job and start exploring new areas related to their specialization. Physician who is no longer focused on their work also negatively affect the company they work with. Employers want productive and efficient employees who feel valued. Knowing when to change jobs is beneficial for you and your employer.
This post aims to provide a helpful article to inform medical professionals when it may be time to explore alternate career trajectories.
Signs it might be time to change jobs
1. You would become apathetic to your current job
Doctors have a significant impact on patients’ lives by aiding in recovery and symptom management and providing emotional support. A loss of passion or engagement can lead to dissatisfaction and careless mistakes, ultimately failing patients’ expectations. It’s crucial to find job satisfaction to positively impact patients’ lives.
Medicine is an intensive profession as well as demanding, as healthcare is a basic human need. Proper treatment and recovery are crucial for patients to focus on their life goals and interests. Being a physician requires higher levels of patience and attention. As a doctor, you have the power to truly help people and improve their lives. It’s normal for medical professionals to feel demotivated at times, even if they love their job, due to intense personal or work-related pressures. Yet, if a pediatrician can’t remember the last time she enjoyed examining and dealing with kids, or a general practitioner has been doing routine checkups of patients with a huge dissatisfaction for longer periods, it may be time to reassess your career goals. You can explore our job list for new roles in case you need to refresh your career.
2. Your current job is negatively impacting your personal life
Balancing work and life is tough for medical professionals striving for excellence, who may face poor co-worker relations, exhaustion, and surgical mistakes. If work stress affects personal life or others suggest a career change, consider a job switch. Physical reactions from work affecting personal life require time off. Continuous exhaustion and isolation weaken relationships. Periodic stress highlights the work-life balance importance. Assess if your career path aligns with your preferences to balance your career and personal life.
3. Having a job that aligns with your core values is important for career growth
Doctors spend most of their days at work, with the company they work for. Therefore, cultural alignment with their employers and co-workers is critically important for practitioners to have optimal productivity and higher levels of job satisfaction. This misalignment can come in many forms. A foreign doctor at an international company may not feel alienated during his own cultural holidays as he’ll be working. A GP at a new clinic may struggle to adapt to the needs of a new community. Aligned values and job understanding improve a doctor’s co-worker relations and career advancement. This applies to a variety of factors, even something as simple as language. Speaking colleagues’ native language helps physicians treat patients better and build stronger professional and social relationships. Physicians can seek culturally suitable workplaces that support career growth when their values don’t align with their current institution.
If you feel stuck, just know there are many options available for career changers
It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and feel there isn’t an easy way to change your job, after all your current job would be a result of your hard work and interests. But during busy years, you may find yourself seeking a switch to another field of medicine. Doctors can switch to medical writing, research, or corporate roles, even with additional training, to improve working conditions. They can also work in unconventional settings like ships, the army, or prisons if they tire of hospitals/clinics. Alternative medical career opportunities are available for doctors who prefer variety and flexibility.
Should I definitely change my job if I deal with one of the listed reasons?
Listed are just a few of the factors that will cause doctors to change their jobs. Periodic dissatisfaction should not cause resignation. Here are some useful areas to guide your thinking before coming to a decision on changing your current job:
- your personal career goals
- development opportunities at your current job
- work-life balance
- work environment
- employee turnover
- job satisfaction
When you sense a long-standing problem in your profession and if it starts to affect you, your patients, and your work negatively, you should first turn to yourself and look for the problem introspectively. At this stage, you should always be honest with yourself and open to innovations for a healthier professional life, because the control of your career is always in your hands. After your detailed observation process, if you still dream about a new career path, check out the jobs on Doctor Jobs Today.
About Doctor Jobs Today
Doctor Jobs Today is the first job-seeking platform in Southeast Asia dedicated to serving the job searching needs of healthcare professionals. We have created a space to connect employers and medical job seekers seamlessly. As part of the healthcare community, we understand that traditional job portals are not catered toward medical doctors. So we decided to create a portal advertising only the most relevant jobs from the top employers within the industry because we are just as picky as you are!
Doctor Jobs Today has the right vacancy whether you are looking for a higher salary, a better-equipped hospital for your specialization, or even a career shift from patient care.
About Docquity
If you feel like your educational and professional experience has not been sufficient to make your CV pop, expanding the network to other healthcare professionals to practise peer-to-peer learning might be the answer. One of the ways to do it is by joining a social platform for healthcare professionals, such as Docquity.
Docquity is the region’s largest and most trusted community of doctors, bringing you real-time knowledge from thousands of doctors worldwide. Today, Docquity has over 300,000 doctors spread across six countries in Asia.
Meet experts and trusted peers across Asia where you can safely discuss clinical cases, get up-to-date insights from webinars and research journals, and earn CME/CPD credits through certified courses. All with the ease of a mobile app available on Android & iOS platforms!
