How to Craft Your Dream Career
If you’re a doctor or medical student in the UK, the thought of leaving medicine for tech has probably crossed your mind. It definitely crossed mine. But that thought would be just that. It usually doesn’t make it past a passionate conversation with friends at the end of a ward round. That was until this year, where everything changed…
Introduction
Why I wanted to make the change
How I made the change:
Pre-exit
Peri-exit
Hey guys, my name's Shaene and I'm a doctor, supervisor at Oxford University, and manager at Doccla, a multi-million health tech company, building the first and largest virtual hospital in Europe.
Today, I want to share with you why and how I made the decision to leave medicine for health tech.
It was the first step in a monumental career change for me, filled with lots of fear, uncertainty and worry.
But also lots of excitement, opportunity and happiness in equal measure.
In this video, I’ll share with you how I managed to break into health tech as a medic.
But first, why?
So, why did I want to make the change?
Over time, my experiences, such as starting and scaling the “Doctor Shaene” business, and my network of friends, which include lawyers, tech company founders and management consultants, pushed me to develop knowledge, skills and interests in tech, business development and the commercial law world.
In truth, the decision stemmed from a feeling of dissatisfaction and want for more out of life, so really a very personal thing.
However, I finally got to the bottom of this feeling by sitting down and writing the push and pull factors in preparation for this video.
Push factors away from NHS:
I found that the NHS, limited by resources, was slow to innovate first-hand and slow to adopt second-hand innovation and technology.
It was also limited by so much red tape, masquerading as patient safety, that it was sluggish, inflexible and un-agile when it came to solving problems; the ever-growing patient waiting lists for example.
All of this frequently made me frustrated especially when my time, as a specialist doctor with 9 years of education and experience, was used to do non-patient related tasks, such as filing slides, that in the tech world or in a better funded healthcare system, would be done in a few seconds by software.
Moving on, my day to day lacked business, commercial and operational elements.
I would often find myself on the way to or back from work listening to podcasts about business development and commercial law.
I had pretty much lost interest in the minute details of medicine and cared more about filling huge gaps in my general, financial and commercial knowledge; which is a frequent problem for all doctors.
Finally, my choice of specialty, pathology, took me further away from patients, which acted as a gateway that accelerated my decision to exit.
The truly special thing about being a doctor, in my opinion, is the fact I get to spend most of my day working as a team, talking to sick people, treating them, seeing the results and getting a few thank yous.
Once this was largely taken away from me, the idea of leaving medicine was able to blossom, which brings me onto the pull factors towards health tech.
Pull factors towards health tech:
Health tech is built on constant innovation through tech.
It’s flexible on a personal level, think remote-hybrid working, and on an industry level.
Meaning that companies within the industry are hyper-agile and promote trying new things, safely, without waiting years for approval by dozens of layers of middle management.
The health-tech space often has a win-win mission, such as improving patient experience and saving tax payer money.
And it also solves interesting and stimulating problems, which can be fixed by tech, something that personally appeals to me.
Finally, it fulfilled my business, commercial and operational interests and development.
Importantly, it brought me closer to my overall goal, which was to enter commercial law and progress within that career.
More on this last bomb-shell later, but next, my pre-exit strategy which allowed me to lay the foundation that enabled me to achieve the difficult task of breaking into health tech.
I figured out some of these push and pull factors very early on, probably in 2017 at end of my third year at medical school.
This luckily enabled me to decide, whilst I was still a medical student, that I wanted to have the option of exiting medicine into something corporate once I had finished my F2 and become a full GMC registered doctor.
So, using the luxury of time that’s afforded to clinical students, I started identifying possible career directions for ex-doctors.
One way I did this was by finding ex-doctors who had exited to the corporate world to help me identify the spectrum of exit opportunities.
After all, before I could start tailoring myself towards an exit, I had to figure out what it is I wanted to exit to.
This process of identifying ex-doctors in the corporate world, back then, wasn’t super straightforward, LinkedIn was only really starting to become big and podcasts weren’t as prolific as they are now.
So, if I was doing this from scratch in 2024, then I would go straight to LinkedIn and podcasts such as ScrubbedIn which are a treasure trove when it comes to identifying successful ex-doctors.
I’ll link these resources, as well as some cool ex-doctors that inspired me, below.
Anyway, during this fairly laborious process, I Identified that management consulting and health tech had the highest footfall, followed by investment banking, private equity and commercial law.
There were and are of course other exits, but these were the ones that interested me and played to my skills and strengths.
After I identified the possibilities, I then started researching individuals in each sector to find out what they had done to get where they were.
From this, I identified, fairly unsurprisingly, that all these successful ex-doctors had industry related qualifications and experiences that helped them exit**.**
What I mean by this are qualifications and experiences relating to
leadership,
teamwork,
project management,
client relations,
business development,
technology
research,
and finally, the holy-grail: industry experience.
Once I had narrowed down what I needed to a manageable list, I began actively searching for and only undertook high yield projects that fell within at least 3 or more of these buckets.
Here are some examples of things I did that helped me break into health tech:
I undertook competitive, selective and national-international level leadership courses such as the HLA and NHS leadership academy programmes.
I taught and held management positions at reputable universities such as Cambridge and Oxford to build communication, teamwork, leadership, empathy and credibility.
I created educational content globally and scaled this into a profitable digital business.
I led digital and AI flavoured projects both as a uni supervisor and as a pathology doctor in a digital pathology centre, making sure that the project would result in growing either my experience or result in a qualification such as a presentation, poster and-or prize.
These projects also helped me interface with industry partners such as Paige.AI and Philips.
Other things I had on my radar, which I would have done, had I not already exited, were the Fellowship in Clinical Artificial Intelligence and Bitelabs Healthtech & Innovation fellowship.
Once I had laid the ground-work, then I focussed my attention to identifying specific exits and started crafting my CV and cover letter to suit the specific opportunities I wanted.
This next part, I call my peri-exit strategy.
At the beginning of the video, I alluded to my overall goal, which was to enter commercial law.
Having this overall goal in mind allowed me to take a focussed approach in searching for and selecting my specific exit as part of my peri-exit strategy.
This is how my thinking went:
I identified that I had the necessary uni and grades to make me a competitive applicant for a training contract at top commercial law firms, but I personally felt that some time spent in industry would give me a real edge, not just to enter commercial law, but also to be a real asset whilst I was there.
I knew that my niche within commercial law was likely to be life sciences, given my medical background, so I was on the lookout for a health tech company that was small enough to give me horizontal growth, but large enough to provide some stability.
Importantly, the company had to have a mission that resonated with me and excited me.
So, in summary, I wanted my specific health tech exit to have a goldilocks size and personally exciting mission.
One day I was scrolling LinkedIn and came across my then internet, now real life, friend Yath’s post about his new job at Doccla.
This prompted me to carry out some due-diligence and found out that Doccla was a post-series A, but pre-series B, multimillion health tech company, aiming to be Europe’s first and largest virtual ward company.
This was the perfect fit in terms of size, stability and mission that I was looking for.
And even better, they were still hiring for the same management position my friend Yath had been appointed to.
Once I had decided it was for me, it was then time to apply, so I crafted my CV and cover letter, with the help of AI and shot off an application.
A month later, ironically during one of the junior doctor strikes, I get an offer for an interview and 3 rounds of interviews later, in about a week, I was hired.
Now, I’ll explain how exactly I crafted my CV and cover letter, as well as how I prepared for my interviews in articles to come.
I’ll also explain how I managed to keep my training number as a doctor and leave for health-tech, in effect having my cake and eating it.
Finally, as I get further along in my health-tech journey, I’ll share some real-life pros and cons of staying in medicine vs leaving for health-tech; for example rewards, perks and career progression.
But that’s it from me for today, thanks so much for reading and I’ll see you in the next one…