Medicine : Your skills

Medicine is a vocational degree and studying medicine allows you to develop the practical and clinical capabilities specific to medicine, as well as the professional and personal attributes necessary to be a doctor.

You also develop a range of other transferable skills through your course, such as critical appraisal, observation, listening, logical reasoning and decision making. These skills are crucial when working as a doctor, but are just as useful in work outside medicine. Other transferable skills you acquire whilst studying medicine include:

• written communication - completing assignments, taking patient histories and completing medical reports;
• oral communication - developing listening as well as talking skills through discussing patient treatment with other medical staff, explaining diagnosis and prognosis to patients and relatives in language that they can understand, and developing an empathic approach;
• teamworking - working with others to complete a task, to understand your role and the roles of others within a multidisciplinary health care team;
• leadership - providing guidance to others and gaining responsibility;
• computer literacy and information handling - through projects and assignments;
• self-study techniques;
• time and resource management and the ability to prioritise your workload;
• the ability to work under pressure;
• negotiation and mediation - understanding someone else's point of view and being non-judgemental;
• the ability to deal with uncertainty and to work within a changing environment;
• teaching and mentoring;
• personal development planning - self-appraisal, presentation skills and managing your work-life balance.

Consider the skills developed on your course as well as through your other activities, such as paid work, volunteering, family responsibilities, sport, membership of societies, leadership roles, etc. Think about how these can be used as evidence of your skills and personal attributes. Then you can start to market and sell who you really are, identify what you may be lacking and consider how to improve your profile. Take a look at job application advice for some useful tips.