As a medical doctor, you might be thinking, of what use is the social media platform, LinkedIn, to me? You have got your job already, a very tight schedule to the mix, and you work in an industry that thrives on sick people and caffeine. You have got all the security you need.
However, as a professional doctor, a job or job security isn’t the only thing you need to advance in your field. It’s important to keep yourself up to date with current breakthroughs and advancements in your field. You also want to create a profile that allows you to be seen, to create networking opportunities for yourself, and to showcase your own progress to an international community of medical and health professionals. Even if you’re not looking to get another job, you might attract collaboration opportunities or conferences.
Moreover, if you’re, like many doctors, planning to migrate to other countries such as Canada, and you’ve written all the necessary exams such as MCCQE and USMLE Step 1 and Step 2, then a LinkedIn profile would be very important to find your prospective workplaces and employers.
LinkedIn is a place that presents great opportunities for medical professionals, and to attract the best opportunities, you have to set up a great profile that can serve as the digital resumé. In this article, we’ll consider ten tips on how to create the best and most optimized profile on LinkedIn as a medical doctor.
1. Give Priority To Your Profile Pictures
When recruiters stumble upon a person’s profile on LinkedIn, the first thing they do is examine your profile picture. This is to ascertain whether or not you’re a serious person to deal with, a reason your profile picture should not be a selfie of you, or you in casual clothes, or even in leisure settings like a bar or at a friend’s wedding venue.
All of this doesn’t make you stand out, and what you want to do is stand out as a person of value, and this is done by posting a professional photo of you, either in your white lab coat and accessories or in your scrubs while smiling at the camera. It is important that your profile picture is shot from the waist up, with you smiling in it. You can hire a professional photographer to take some photos of you, capturing you in your most professional self.
2. Create an Amazing Headline
Another step to optimizing your profile as a medical doctor is to make good use of your headline section. This is a space to let people know what you do, and for whom your services are for, all in a short sentence. There are only about 120 characters in the headline section, so it should only contain important details about your profession, so as to let others know what you really do.
Your headline should have your place of work, your field of expertise, and your leadership position; these are the three main ingredients to promoting yourself on LinkedIn.
3. Craft a Catchy Summary
This is the part where you tell your connections and potential recruiters who you are and what you stand for. You want to let people know a side of you that might interest them, highlighting your strengths and value proposition. This helps to impress people who might want to connect with you, as they would see your goals, aspirations, visions for the medical field, and the exciting new projects you might be working on.
It is essential that you do this in the first person while tailoring your summary to suit your preferred medical field. Each paragraph of your summary should not be more than 2-3 sentences long. Short, concise, and straight to the point.
4. Set Up Your Recommendations
Asking people, especially those in the field as you are, to recommend you to recruiters is another way to add some spice to your LinkedIn profile. It lets recruiters know the kind of person they would be hiring, as people’s opinions about you would inform their decision.
If people say good and ethical things about you and your contribution to their projects, it increases your overall chances of getting emailed or even hired for a role. Recommendations are a great way to bolster the level of your specialty and professionalism to those who might want to connect with you, setting you up for a more prosperous medical career.
5. Catalog Your Past Projects
In your life as a medical practitioner, there will be times when you have collaborated with some medical firms, businesses, and even organizations to achieve a set goal or objective within a particular region.
These firms or organizations might bring you onboard so as to share your knowledge and expertise with them, perhaps to find a cure for an illness, to carry out research that could lead to a groundbreaking revelation in medicine.
All of these are great instances and clauses to include on your LinkedIn profile, no matter how small the projects might have been, having them there is another way to let recruiters know they will be going for the right guy.
6. State Your Past Work Experiences
This also falls under the previous point, with the only difference being the positions you have occupied and the duration you have occupied them for. Nothing gives a better outlook on a person’s career than the previous places they have worked and how far they have gone in their career, the same goes for medical doctors.
This section, according to Heather Austin, allows you to “tell a better career story” by telling everyone what you have done and how you had gotten there, building on the progression of your career. This is often done in a less formal tone than it would be in your CV, using industry-specific keywords.
7. Connect with Individuals in Your Field
The search bar and the filter option are great tools when it comes to looking for people in your industry or field. And as a medical doctor, you are, no doubt, going to see people within your line of expertise. All you have to do is type in your profession, and using the filter, select the location you want – could be around you – and there you go, all the doctors within your city, who practice the exact same thing as you.
And once you have done this, send each of them a connection request, followed by a personal, less than formal message, telling them why you would want to connect with them. Make sure it’s personal enough, or else you scare them away.
8. Get more Attention with Publications
If you have any written publications under your belt, one you may have done for yourself or someone else, it is imperative that you add them to your profile. It is a great way to build your portfolio and cement the fact that you are someone to reckon with in the medical field.
This will alert other people, preferably recruiters, to the skills and knowledge that you possess, giving them more reasons why they should connect with you, follow you, or even consider you for a role.
9. Outline Your Skills
Your strengths, the level you have attained, and the traits that set you apart from the next doctor, are all what you should outline on your LinkedIn profile. You need to let people know what qualities you have and the things you are good at, as that is one thing they might look out for.
The LinkedIn algorithm uses these skills to pull people toward your profile, thereby getting you more likes and more connections, which are all important if you are going to succeed on the LinkedIn platform.
10. Don’t Forget The Education Section
This part is very crucial to the success of your time on LinkedIn. You need to let people know where you had gotten your skills and knowledge from, by giving your level of education and what you had gotten from them.
Take note, that primary and secondary education are not needed in this section, as you should only restrict your education to the highest levels. That is, only give the name of your university and the degree you attained from there, you can also give the names of specialized colleges you attended and the subspecialty you studied in these colleges.
If you have a postgraduate degree in any higher medical field, or certification from any institution, it is important that you add all of them to your profile, thereby giving you more chances to become more on LinkedIn.
These tips will help you create a great LinkedIn profile and position yourself to attract great opportunities, collaboration, and employers. If you need more tips on how to prepare for better employment opportunities as a medical doctor and in writing professional exams, CanadaQBank is a comprehensive question bank that also simulates practical questions and scenarios prior to the exams, allowing you to understand the underlying concepts.