Tessa Davis shows NHS trainees how to position themselves for consultant roles. The key shift: stop thinking about individual patient care and start thinking about service design, team management, and budgeting. Three mistakes to avoid are staying registrar-focused, burying senior-level work, and presenting yourself as someone who needs heavy support.
If you aren't an experienced consultant, maybe you're a final year trainee or you've just started a locum consultant job, then it can be really hard to demonstrate in your NHS substantive consultant interview that you are ready and that you think like a consultant. In this video, I'm going to walk you through how to demonstrate senior-level thinking. Firstly, it's really important for you to understand the difference between working at a reg level and working at a consultant level. Many of you are in reg or fellow jobs and worried about demonstrating that you're ready. And even if you're in a locum job, you might be worrying about, well, the exact same thing. So remember that the panel doesn't need a really good reg. We know you're a really good reg. They need a consultant. And I remember how it feels when you've been in training for such a long time. You just, you know how to be an excellent reg, but for this role, they want something different. Senior level thinking shows that you're ready to step up, and that doesn't mean clinically ready. Just remind yourself that you are clinically ready. That's what your CCQs CT or your caesarean is for, but you need to be ready to step up from a leadership, management, and cognitive point of view. And you have to demonstrate that you understand the role of a consultant and why it's different. At a reg level, we're trying to deliver the best care to the patient in front of us, and really we're trying to do that as, as often as possible to see as many patients as we can in an effective way that delivers good quality care. But at consultant level, We are thinking about how to deliver the best care to our population as a whole so that we can deliver a service that serves our population best. And that's the difference, is that we're not as focused on one-to-one care. It's not that at a consultant level you don't want to deliver the best care for the individual patient. Of course we do. But actually, you've got to have that broader perspective as well. And that's one of the things that you're trying to demonstrate with senior-level thinking. So before we go on to tell you the common mistakes to avoid, when trying to show senior-level thinking in your interview. I've put together something that I think will help you. If you'd like to get a sneak peek at some interview questions, I put together a list of the 15 most common questions being asked in interviews this year. You can download them for free at the link in the video, and it's in the description underneath the video too. Okay, so here is where people often go wrong when trying to demonstrate senior-level thinking. The first place people go wrong is using examples where being a reg was core. So every single time you share an example, you should be asking yourself, what are the senior-level If you're a reg, then of course your examples involve being a reg. We get that. But was your role as a trainee central to the example? And if it was, take a step back and think how to best demonstrate your skillset. And this kind of leads on to the second mistake people make, which is not understanding how to demonstrate these tasks by pulling out the senior elements. So a lot of times people think once they've thought of the example they want to share, that's it, the job's done. But in reality, the most important element isn't the overall task, it's the senior aspects within that task. Yeah, and I think that's a really good point. Because that's the part you want to share with your interview panel. So don't just jump quickly to thinking, I've never done any senior tasks, so I've got nothing to share. Actually, you should do some reflecting on what the senior elements of your tasks were. Was it managing a team? Was it dealing with competing interests? Was it pitching ideas? There's many senior elements within individual projects, and it's important that you understand which are yours. So, for example, if you were the trainee rep in a committee, at its core, that's a reg-level task. You have to be a reg. to be the trainee rep, of course. But if you pause and step back, you'll identify the senior-level tasks within that role. So sharing feedback with senior management, having difficult conversations, implementing change, navigating different teams and personalities. So rather than simply saying, I was the trainee rep on whatever committee, tell the panel what your senior tasks were within that. And the third mistake people make is doing all of this badly and making the panel feel like you're not ready or that you'll be a lot of work. And this might seem like I'm being pedantic, but I promise you, if you make yourself sound like a very competent reg, which I'm sure you are, then that's unlikely to push you ahead of the other candidates. The panel wants to see that you are ready, and of course you'll need support when you start in your new role, but you don't want them thinking it's gonna take all their effort and time to push you to that next stage. And similarly, you don't need to share lots of clinical examples to show that you're competent at your job. You're not trying to prove you're clinically competent, and you certainly don't need to prove that you're a good reg. So think like a consultant and show the panel that you know what that means. And this kind of leads on to my final point, making sure you prep well to demonstrate senior-level thinking. So think about the metrics that your specialty uses to measure quality, and you can find these easily. Think about what an ideal service would look like or how you would improve flow and efficiency within your team. If you had to save money for your department or you had money to spend, what would you do? So preparing all of these things will help you when it comes to the senior-level questions that So now you know how to demonstrate senior level thinking, but finally, that very last question, you know they're going to ask you because it gets asked at the end of every interview, but how is it that you should answer that question? And that's exactly what I'm going to look at in this video, which you can check out here.
