Writing A Strong NHS/ Medical Consultant CV

Personal Profile

When you apply for a consultant job, the stakes are higher than for a training job, both for you and for the trust. The trust will really want to make sure that they are getting someone who fulfils all their needs and not just someone who wants to be a consultant.

Many candidates have in their CV a section called "Career Aims" which, very often, says nothing more than "I want to be a consultant and I am a nice person", neither of which are going to encourage a reader to shortlist you. Instead what they want from you is strong reassurance that you tick all the boxes. To get that reassurance they will of course go through the CV and ensure that you match the requirements set out in the person specification, but that will take them some time. So, you need to help them along by writing a personal profile which explains in a nutshell what they can expect from you; essentially this is a short summary of your CV which sits on the first page, almost telling the reader "You probably can't be bothered to read through the following 15 pages, so here is in a few sentences what I can bring to your unit. This should be no more than 20 lines and it should target all the areas set out in the person specification and the job description. 

This section is key because it will be the first impression they get from the CV and because it clarifies why you feel you may be the best candidate. As such it has to be heavily based around the job description so as to show that you understand the post your are applying to and what the needs of the trust are. The personal profile should cover your clinical, teaching, academic and management credentials. 

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 currently working as an associate specialist or a substantive consultant, then it may be worth isolating your current post from the rest of your training. This will highlight the extent of your senior experience and will ensure that your experience of working at a senior level and independently is ring-fenced from the rest of your experience thereby giving 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).

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):

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)
• Writing and implementing new guidelines
• Quality improvement projects
• 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. the Vancouver convention 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 packages, 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.