Medical CV to Business Résumé Conversion

How do I convert my medical experience to a business setting?

“Nearly half of physicians changed jobs during the pandemic,” according to CHG Healthcare’s 2022 survey, leaving healthcare organizations struggling with a rapidly changing physician workforce.

Meanwhile, a 2024 study by the same organization “found that a majority of physicians surveyed made a career change in the [previous] two years.”

As an executive identity and brand development consultancy, this shift has shown up in our work, with a significant rise in engagements with medical doctors undergoing physician career transitions into corporate leadership.

Career evolution for physicians: from clinical to business leadership

Example engagements:

• Orthopedic Surgeon to Chief Medical Officer: Fresh from completing her MBA, this surgeon sought to explore opportunities beyond the operating room. Initially interested in corporate development and M&A, our collaboration revealed a broader spectrum of administrative leadership. Her brand and narrative were rebuilt around business accomplishments that included division expansions and turnarounds, crisis management, supply chain transformations, organizational and board-level governance, capital acquisitions, and physician workforce transformation. We also highlighted her significant contributions to two hospital builds. The new brand repositioned her experience for executive roles in healthcare administration and beyond, and as of this writing, her conversations have included a potential CEO role for a healthcare system.

• Oxford-trained Anaesthesiologist to Corporate Medical Advisor: This physician helped develop an AI-guided medical device that received FDA approval and was subsequently acquired by a blue-chip medical technology company. Our task was to convert his medical CV into a business-facing résumé while he evaluated career options: staying with his current hospital and research lab, joining the acquiring company's new division, or exploring other roles. Through extensive brand and narrative development, we helped him navigate the choices that would shape his next career chapter.

• Hospitalist to Healthcare CEO & Board Member: This Stanford-trained MD transitioned from hospitalist to healthcare executive two decades ago, leading two corporate rebrands and acquisitions. Despite her impressive career, she had never developed her own professional brand, leaving 90% of her story untold. Our collaboration uncovered her extensive functional leadership experience, including corporate governance, strategic finance, revenue overhauls, partnerships, and workforce strategies. This comprehensive rebranding paved the way for her appointment as CEO of a PE-backed healthcare company, which she successfully turned around and sold within two years.

From stethoscope to boardroom

Adapting your medical CV for business opportunities

As a medical doctor, you've spent years honing your clinical skills and building an impressive academic CV. However, when it comes to transitioning into the corporate world, that same CV might not effectively showcase your transferable skills and value to potential employers.

For instance, the publications, presentations, patents, and so on that dominate a medical or academic CV are redistributed in the narrative and given a different weight in a business-facing résumé, which is generally loaded with quantitative detail. (Don’t worry. The publications, et al, don’t go away. They just get a different treatment.)

Experienced physicians, especially those in hospitals and healthcare systems, are also better equipped at bridging the gap between the clinical and administrative sides of the house, but less comfortable when it comes to advocating for themselves when planning to step into a business-facing leadership role.

Our services help MDs translate their medical leadership into business outcomes, positioning them for success in corporate roles.

Navigating the clinical to corporate transition

Medical doctors, like those mentioned above, bring deep medical knowledge and clinical experience to business leadership positions. They’ve frequently learned how to understand and drive growth and efficiency, while advising on parallel matters related to patient outcomes, clinical operations, quality, and beyond.

However, they often overlook the myriad other transferrable skills that they may not recognize, or they may see as “just part of the job.”

Here are just a few of the business skills for doctors that end up in the physician career transition narrative:

• managing large cross-functional teams or groups, either in-hospital, in-clinic, or across organizations and systems

• setting up, contributing to, or reinforcing governance and management structures

• serving on boards, committees, advisory boards, working groups, and so on

• building hospitals and healthcare wings

• co-leading or participating in organization-wide system implementations

• wrestling with headcount planning and optimization

• grappling with patient data

• strategizing on capital expenditures and perhaps overseeing implementation

• overhauling and managing supply chains

• running clinical priorities, administrative decisions, and policies across the divide

• ensuring alignment between business strategies and patient care

How we help

We work side-by-side with physicians to help hash through the nuances and become well-equipped to evolve their careers for what’s next. Our bespoke and deeply intense work with doctors in transition focuses on (a) investigating the dimensions of leadership their future audiences will prioritize; (b) identifying, quantifying, and narrating every dimension of their relevant leadership; (c) creating compelling healthcare executive résumés, bios, and LinkedIn profiles; and then (d) making sure they’re comfortable with how to verbally communicate their value going forward.

What’s your goal?