My Career Path

We understand that navigating the Clinical Academia career landscape can be a complicated task, with questions around eligibility, when’s the right time, and contract situations.

Within this ‘Career’ section of the site, we aim to make this slightly easier to comprehend, with some advice and resources targeted more specifically to each career stage – regardless of whether you’re a student or newly graduated, mid-career or you’ve held a substantive post for a few years now, and you’re just opening the door to something new.

Whilst the career stages can broadly be split into the three options listed above, there are still many smaller steps that it takes to climb this career ladder, and this may look slightly differently depending on each decision you take and how you choose to plot your own path.

The two diagrams below were created during a Summer Project developing a ‘Guide for Medical Students at the University of St Andrews’, with the first outlining a more ‘standard’ medical professional timeline, as you may be familiar with. The second shows how this timeline may look for clinicians that instead adopt a more research-heavy career as a Clinical Academic.

You can take a look at the output of Martina’s summer project with us, here!

What qualifications should I have for my career stage?

The framework represented in the figure below has been created by CATCH to highlight some of the various skillsets, opportunities and objectives that should be achieved at each career stage, broken down into five distinctive career phases. They say that the ‘framework outlines the types of fellowships or personal awards which may be offered at each career stage, aiming to allow flexible entry with increasing degree of research experience, independence, leadership’.

What else can I be looking to achieve to try and further my career and make progress?

The figure below has been created to break your potential career as a Clinical Academic into 4 main activity domains: Research, Engagement, Leadership & Collegiality, and Teaching & Pedagogical Activity. Each of these domains are then broken down even further to highlight the sorts of activities that you should be striving to achieve to make progress through the career stages, gaining seniority as you move from left to right across the dimension of the figure.