Introduction

Introduction to self-assessment

Self-assessment: matching yourself to a specialty.

Understanding yourself is very important when it comes to making decisions about your medical career. Analysing your skills, interests and workplace preferences provides an excellent basis on which to make decisions about the future. This section looks at the different methods available for matching yourself with a specialty.

 

 

A warning about personality testing

There has been quite a lot of research into the impact of personality on specialty choice, and we would all like to enter a description of ourselves into a magic box only to find our “perfect match” career pathway revealed. This is unrealistic for a number of reasons: The literature on personality and medical specialties is far from consistent. In fact a recent review article on the subject concluded that “there is more variation in personality within medical specialties than between them”! Any given personality is suitable for a satisfying career in several specialties, and any given specialty can accommodate a range of personalities. Even if there were a good correlation between personality and medical specialties, this correlation would only tell us about what personalities exist within a specialty, not about the job satisfaction of individuals. There are many factors other than personality that seem to be more important in... more

Values and interests

We feel that far more useful tools, several of which have been developed in recent years, aim to correlate your values and interests with those provided by a surveyed population of practicing doctors. You are required to respond to a number of questions (e.g “do you prefer to have short or long term relationships with patients”), and your responses are correlated with those of various specialists. Compatibility scores for each specialty are then generated. Examples include the Medical Specialty Preference Inventory and Glaxo Pathway (developed in the USA) and the Sci59 (developed in the UK). The Glaxo Pathway can be completed online and was last updated in 2003. The Sci59 was updated in late 2006 with new survey data and is now available to individuals online for a small fee. You can email oucem@open.ac.uk for more details. The MSPI is not freely available. Unfortunately, a similar tool is yet to... more

Self-assessment summary

It is important to explore your interests, skills and values in order to make a good career choice. Tools which analyse these factors may be useful to generate a shortlist of specialties for further exploration, but are only the beginning.... more

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