Impartial careers advice for doctors and medical students

The BMJ careers advice zone may help fill the gap

Research published this week by BMJ Careers adds to the growing evidence of what we intuitively knew already: the majority of medical students and doctors in training are dissatisfied with the careers advice and guidance they receive. Informing Choices: the need for career advice in medical training reports on the views and experiences of 1740 doctors and medical students working in England (see further information box for more details).

Other studies, such as the BMA cohort study that reports on career paths and experiences of doctors who graduated in 1995, confirm that this dissatisfaction is a United Kingdom wide phenomenon.1

As one of the authors of Informing Choices, Charles Jackson, said in an interview in this week's Career Focus (p s191): “We weren't surprised to find out that the respondents to the survey wanted better career advice and support. That had already been well documented by previous research. We set out to find out how that support was currently being provided and also to look at the position of some subgroups, including overseas doctors and doctors from ethnic minority backgrounds.”

The report makes disturbing reading. For example, 91% of doctors in training from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) and 78% of doctors in training from other EEA countries believed that it is more difficult for doctors who are not from the United Kingdom to get access to specialist registrar programmes. This belief is held by only 59% of UK doctors in training.

These results may be because this group of doctors has limited access to the first four sources of careers advice and guidance rated by the respondents as being the most useful: firstly, more experienced peers; secondly, senior doctors; thirdly, family and friends who are doctors; and fourthly, peer group.

Career Focus was rated the fifth most useful source, and we hope that a new web based service, the BMJ careers advice zone, which we are launching today, will further meet the needs of doctors and medical students in their quest for accessible, impartial careers advice. It should go some of the way to help fill the void in providing useful and high quality careers advice and guidance. It also recognises the valuable contribution of both advisers and peers, formal and informal.

Here's how it works: we will publish, on the web, a selection of career queries together with responses from other readers and our panel of more than 200 experienced advisers, who are mostly Career Focus authors. There are around 80 topics covering a whole range of issues, so whether it's choosing a career, what training to do, or how to deal with work related health problems or discrimination, the advice zone should be able to help. It can be used to submit a career query to our panel, search the database of existing questions and advice, and to share career experiences with other users. (Please go to www.bmjcareers.com/advicezone for more details on how it works in practice.)

The advice zone can't offer a confidential counselling service, but we hope that all the questions and answers that we publish from both readers and advisers will grow into a high quality, valued, and accessible database of careers advice. Judging by the findings from Informing Choices, such a service comes not a moment too soon.