[katherine.boyd2_320]

This is fantastic!! Wish I had this when I was a resident.

[ggascat95_565]

Thank you!

[kstepanovs_485]

This is awesome, wish I had it when I began my job search! Will share with my colleagues.

[rwalmsley_851]

Yeah, great PPT resource.

[digitaldoc]

Great PPT! Just began job searching. Very helpful! Thank you!!!

[nelevy920]

No special recipe.

Happy family. Growth opportunity. Work days/pay ratio is telling. Some jobs may start you higher but youll be working. Low 200s total days worked per year is where you should aim to be.

Things to consider…

Partnership is more important now than ever. In the coming years there will be more competition for your job from other specialties interpreting their images and mid-levels. They will do as good of a job supplemented by tech and cost 1/4 of your cost.
If YOU are the partner you can help make decisions that preserve YOUR job.

Academics is already largely going this direction. Its the tiptoe method. Most all cardiac imaging is now going to cards even more as theyre seeing the value of CTA in an acute setting and PCA is becoming less fruitful. I see interventional nephrologists, neurologists, vascular surgery, Interventional cards etc. They do procedures and interpret images.

Go out and get a job. Work hard. Be personable. Find a niche. Dont get caught up in the fellowship scam. There are very few that are actually worth it. What matters most is patient care and how why you interpret directly impacts that. Otherwise its just fluff.

[gkchapa]

You raise a good point about considering the total number of days worked in a given year. And yes, low 200’s is a good balance.
 
I’m aware of a group that advertises itself as having 13+ weeks off a year but they also work 12 weekends, which are 2 full days, with a full schedule similar to a regular weekday.  The group in recent years has required individuals to give back a certain number of vacation days a month because they’re short staffed.   So they’re actually taking about 4 weeks off a year if you do the arithmetic.  Job seekers should do this sort of calculation so they know what they’re getting into.
 
And yes, private practice job seekers should strive to get partnership-track jobs.  As practices merge, and a greater percentage of docs are employed by corporate entities, ‘partnership’ opportunities in the traditional sense will become less frequent. Studies have shown that recently minted med school grads are less resistant to employed positions.  That powerpoint talk will look very different in 5 years.  It’s important to note that many employed positions, even with such entities as Kaiser Permanente, actually do offer a level of ‘partnership’ but without the self-determination that an independent private practice would have.  This even applies to some of the private equity owned practices, which are actually a quite heterogeneous group with very different organizational structures.
 
And academic practices are all over the map.  A common structure is to have the academic radiology department as a member of the ‘faculty practice’ with the chairman appointed by the Dean, and paid fully or in part by the medical school leading to a split allegiance.  I’m aware of a Midwest university whose chairman required the faculty rads to sign non-competes to their employment contracts so they couldn’t leave and take jobs in the community, as well as other requirements the faculty universally didn’t like, like forcing senior members to enroll in MOC despite having lifetime certification.
 
And regarding fellowships.   Virtually all residents do fellowships, and I think it would be a bad idea not to do one in this day and age.  Groups want a go-to guy in the group even though most fellowship-trainied rads do mostly general radiology. 
 
In the 1990’s I can remember a number of our residents who didn’t do fellowships, ended up taking solo radiology jobs, or joined small groups having trouble attracting rads in rural areas.  They were so happy to get a warm body.  In my own experience, I interviewed for jobs as a senior resident, and decided to do a fellowship and interviewed again during the fellowship.   A universe of job opportunities opened up that was unavailable without the fellowship, even then in the middle ages.
 
Regarding the turf issues of non-rads doing their own imaging.  How it gets handled is highly local, and depends on the strengths of the group and local hospital politics. This is nothing new, and in fact is one of the greatest reasons to have fellowship-trained rads setting the standards that the non-rads have to meet.  I knew a situation where the cardiologists said “We want to do our own CTA reads during the day 8-5 and you can do the rest”.  The response from the group was “We’ll set up an every-other-week schedule including nights, weekends, and holidays that you’ll need to have somebody on call. And BTW, we’ll be reading the lungs, mediastinum, upper abdomen and skeletal parts of the exams [b]you[/b] read, and you will have to reimburse us for that”.  And the rads  could play hardball like that because they had crackerjack cardiac trained readers.
 

[Unknown Member]

Quote from biker-rad

I’m a staff rad and prepared a talk for our residents on how to find a radiology job and factors to consider in a job offer.  It’s listed on the Michigan Radiological Society website for download as a .pdf powerpoint talk.
Here’s the link:
[link=https://michigan-rad.org/resident-resources/]https://michigan-rad.org/resident-resources/[/link]

 
I’ve spent 5 minutes skimming the Powerpoint on above.  Great job!
 
It is both detailed and fairly comprehensive. I didn’t look at every slide closely enough to say I agree with every single thing in it, but it gets my stamp of approval.  Definitely worth the time for trainees to spend 20 or 30 minutes looking through it in detail. 
 
My own 10,000 ft view (big picture) perspective on job hunt is:
 
– First figure out the locations where you and your spouse will be happy. For most people, where your or your spouse’s parents live will be an important factor.  A good job in that location is better than a great job in a location that you find mediocre. Aside from just being close to family, it’s free childcare by people you trust and whose lives are greatly enriched by the opportunity. 
 
– Turn up your charisma and ‘game’ to find a job through networking, do not rely on ‘Want ads.’
 
– Be flexible with job description. E.g. don’t say, I won’t consider a job where I have to do any breast work; or that I have to get 50% neuro. Don’t rule anything out based on that.
 
– Look for happy radiologists who get along and who have confidence in the group leaders. If they think the senior partners are a55holes giving themselves the cush rotations, it’s not a good sign. If they think “every man for himself” and demand tit for tat or are afraid to ask for help because they don’t want to be indebted to their partners, that’s not a good sign.  
 
– Obviously, look at turnover and dig deep as the groups that churn through rads will not advertise it.
 
– Look for burnout. Some groups are led by people who work themselves to death and will sacrifice important things in order to make just a little more. They will expect the same of you. “Nevermind Joe, he takes up everyone’s call and is running ragged all the time.” A group doesn’t let someone run ragged because they can’t help themselves, because it impacts more than them, it affects the group in the long term. Wellness is a real thing that is worth investing in, as it is the Goose that lays the golden eggs of tomorrow. This is thing is a marathon not a sprint, and the dynamics of a good group are like a well-oiled machine, they don’t let a cog get dull or a screw get stripped (so to speak) before changes are made to work flow , work load, or rotation distribution. 
 
– Yeah money and vacation are important. But just as you cannot compare the cost per pound of fancy apples from Whole Foods to a cost per pound of half rotting apples somewhere, you cannot simply divide take-home income by days worked and use that as a blind metric to compare jobs. A day worked in a miserable hellhole is not equivalent to a day worked somewhere that is better organized with good morale. As a trainee where you have delayed financial gratification, you may over-prioritize the income part of it, but trust me on this. After the first few years, by the time you have bought your first house , driving a nice car, had some dinners, gone on some nice vacations…. work environment, group morale, group leadership, fairness, quality of work, organization… these are what make a good job good, in the long term, and you will be willing at that point to give up a nice chunk of change to get it.  So look for these things up front, and no better way to know than by knowing people inside the group through your network.