Moving out of practice was never the plan. And we all have a plan, right? My plan from the age of 16, was to do the right A-levels, do the right work experience every school holiday and weekend, get into Vet School, pass vet school, become a vet (in my mind a practicing clinical vet)… forever.
I remember talking about moving out of practice with my friends at University. We told ourselves, ‘Sure, if we really weren’t enjoying it we’d happily do a non-clinical job’. But in the back of my mind I firstly didn’t know how difficult that would be, and secondly I like proving myself and others wrong. And to be a part of the statistic that a large proportion of vets are leaving by 5 years post graduation, really felt like a failure to me.
And yet, I got to year 4 and I just couldnt see a future for myself in clinical practice ( I’ve been an equine vet since graduating). Not for lack of variety in jobs and a couple of career breaks: I started travelling around Australia, NZ and India in the first 6 months after vet school.
I got an internship in NZ and worked there a year before travelling home via Japan, Phillipines, Vietnam and Cambodia. Mid-pandemic I joined a small equine practice deep in the beautiful Highlands of Scotland, then moved south to Northumberland where I’ve been up until now.
So What Happened?
Firstly, I was finding that I found my job less and less interesting. When in the first few years, you’re still learning new things fairly frequently and trying out new techniques. I started to feel a scary amount of disinterest. It was disconcerting and I didn’t know what to do about it. My clinical director was asking me what kind of area I’d like to develop in and do more CPD in, and there really wasn’t anything that gave me a spark.
I started a certificate in the hope that it would re-ignite some kind of academic passion and interest, but I hated doing it, so finished the first module and promptly stopped.
Secondly, as my current role looked less and less exciting, I also couldn’t see how it would change much in the next 10, 20, 30 years in practice. I knew a residency and specialisation wasn’t something I was committed or interested enough for, so GP equine practice it was. And sure, I could change location and practice, but the role itself was very unlikely to develop and challenge me anymore than it had already done.
Being owned by a corporate meant that partnership was no option, and clinical directorship would have entailed working there for a long, long time, doing the same job I was currently in that whole time. Career progression is something that the RCVS has finally only just cottoned onto, but there’s still a long way to go, and my manager certainly never discussed where my career was heading in our 1-to-1 chats.
Unlike many other industries, once you become a qualified vet, the ladder is missing many rungs, in fact in large animal practice specifically, there aren’t really any rungs to climb. So all these super ambitious people who leave vet school, who have spent their whole life preparing to jump through the next hoop, do seem to find themselves in a bit of a career no-man’s-land once they get to this stage.
Building on lack of career progression, especially in large animal practice in the north, salary trajectory is also pretty bleak. And I knew that the life I wanted to create for myself, meant that I’d want to be earning more than I’d be able to achieve in the next 5-10 years as an equine vet.
Finally, the hours. And more specifically, out of hours. Uncompensated out of hours work was becoming harder and harder, when I could see friends in other industries out enjoying every weekend and evening free as a bird. Not only that, but receiving emergency calls became incredibly anxiety inducing. So much so, that I started to get physical shakes as soon as a call came through. I wasn’t nervous about being able to deal with the case itself, it was more the unknown of – am I going to sleep tonight? Is this going to be an emotional rollercoaster? Is it going to be a disaster zone?
Sorry to be a be a little doom and gloom, but I want to be brutally honest – no sugarcoating. But this isn’t to mean that this reflects anyone else’s experience in practice!
The First Steps to Change
I just had no idea where to start with these feelings of disillusionment and dissatisfaction. I spent a lot of time feeling jealous of people I saw on Vets Stay Go Diversify who had branched out into new jobs, but I just didn’t know how to get there. And was that right for me? How did I know?
I stumbled across a podcast episode with Jenny Guyat a vet and career coach, and what she was saying resonated with me so much, so I got in contact with her. This felt huge for me, but Jenny made me feel like all these emotions of discontent and shame were absolutely normal, and that we could totally work through this and make a plan. And breathe…
Prioritising my time and myself
The first thing I did was ask for a 4 day week to take back some time for myself. This enabled me to have more time for exploring other career paths, and also give myself just a bit of a break for my mental health in general. It’s pretty exhausting being burned out an unhappy at work.
In my never ending spiral of work, on call, keeping up with housework and life admin, and just getting the dog walked every day, Jenny helped me realise how many other parts of my ‘self’ I’d started having to neglect. I hadn’t seen friends for ages, I hadn’t planned any quality time with my partner much. The gym was beginning to send me motivational emails as I hadn’t been there in so long, and it had been a hot minute since I’d committed an afternoon to pottering around my garden (my tiny place of ultimate zen).
I soon had headspace to commit to positive change, and especially in my career.
To clinical or not to clinical?
My main concern was how do I know if this is me or just the current job putting me off? Would I just feel better somewhere else or working with a different species?
This is something that I worked through with Jenny too. I realised by talking through what I found really stressful at work, paired with results from my psychometric test, that there are lots of reasons why my brain doesn’t gel with lots of aspects of working in clinical practice. Plus, the more I envisaged myself starting work in a new practice, the more uninspired I felt about the future again.
The great thing is that once I’d decided I wanted to look for jobs outside of clinical practice, I knew I’d always be able to go back to it if I wanted to. The door is always open, and this just gave me the confidence to really go for it.
So What Did I Want to Do?
One of the hardest parts of working out what I wanted to do was knowing what actually existed outside of practice!
Cue a lot of googling, searching Indeed, watching YouTube videos of “Day in the Life of a …’, and looking around on LinkedIn.
And this is when I started job prototyping. Job prototyping was coined by Bill Burnet and Dave Evans who wrote the book ‘Designing Your Life’. Prototyping sort of sounds like a weird word to use right? But whenever anyone has a great idea for an invention, they build a prototype to see if it’s going to work. You can use a prototype to assess if your assumptions are correct, if the idea is worth greater investment (in this case time and effort applying for jobs), and gather data about an interesting future idea.
So how do you prototype your life and a job? You talk to people doing those jobs!
How to Job Role Prototype
So I reached out to people I connected with on LinkedIn and Instagram to ask if I could chat to them about their job and find out what they really did. I searched for people who had left practice and did jobs that either sounded really interesting to me, jobs I’d never heard of and was curious about, or had started up their own businesses and I wanted to know how!
Luckily the veterinary profession is an incredibly friendly community and I managed to set up a meeting (all just on zoom) with a new person almost every Tuesday I had off in my new 4 day work week schedule from June until August 2022! I got to meet so many interesting people doing interesting things, and it felt so comforting to know that other vets had felt the same as me and found fulfilment in their new ventures!
Vets had no end of advice and help, I even got offered some freelance work here and there off the back of some of these meetings (you never know what you’re going to find!). By the end of every meeting, I’d usually also have a list of other people to get in touch with recommended to me, and so the process continued.
I asked them a whole heap of questions, like: what their actual day-to-day involved, how much they enjoyed their job, could they see themselves doing it long-term, how would I know if it was something that would suit me? How did they get into that role in the first place? What sort of qualities suited this job?
This is the number one thing I recommend other people do when I’ve been asked about how I found a job out of practice. Not only did I get lots of really useful ideas about job roles, but I also helped build a network of fantastic vets who support me and I’d absolutely do the same for any of them in the future.
To be continued!
This was already turning into a serious essay so we can all have a breather there. Stay tuned for part 2 where I talk about how to work out what you’re good at, job searching and applying to non-vet jobs!
ThisVetCan 