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The field of family medicine is broad, with a deep well of opportunities in clinical and non-clinical settings. While these opportunities provide family physicians with ample career options, it also can make career transitions more complex for established doctors and daunting to residents seeking their first job.
On a recent episode of the Inside Family Medicine podcast, hosts Lauren Brown-Berchtold, M.D., FAAFP; Jason Marker, M.D., M.P.A., FAAFP; and Tamaan Osbourne-Roberts, M.D., M.B.A., FAAFP, discussed the sometimes thorny path of career transitions and how to best navigate a career crossroads. Here are seven key tips from their discussion.
Throughout the American workforce, median job tenure is at its shortest in decades, with a length of 3.9 years as of January 2024. Younger workers are staying at each job for shorter times, with the median tenure of workers ages 25 to 37 at 2.7 years.
This trend has also affected family medicine, with more physicians undergoing career transitions more often. This is especially true for residents entering their first job. A 2023 survey from the Medical Group Management Association found that physicians who finished residency or fellowship in the preceding six years stayed at that job less than two years on average — notably less even than the median worker in the American workforce.
“Most of us who transition from residency will end up taking a job that won't be forever,” Osbourne-Roberts says. One of the key lessons for early career physicians is to try to avoid the burden of searching for a mythical “perfect job.”
“The evidence supports the fact that you are going to transition pretty quickly,” Brown-Berchtold says. “Instead of saying, no, no, no, no, I have pressure to have the perfect job that I will be in for the rest of my life, just accepting I need a job that I like and that my life is going to change.”
For Osbourne-Roberts, it is vital to not simply look for and apply for the job with the highest salary or the best benefits, but to think more fundamentally about the uniquely varied career options available to family physicians. “I wish I had considered earlier to say: What is my goal? What do I want to do?”
Every physician has a different family situation, a different financial situation and different interests. The only person who can determine what truly matters to you is you. “Take some time to write a personal mission statement for yourself,” Marks recommends. “Make sure you've done an online values exercise. Do all of these things concurrent to your search.
“Try to make sure you are finding something with good alignment to your personal values that will make it easier to do that transition.”
Sometimes family physicians find jobs. Other times, jobs find family physicians. Marker, Osbourne-Roberts and Brown-Berchtold all stress the importance of being open to unexpected opportunities.
“I think that if I summarized my entire story from a transition lens, it would really be about being open to the things that the universe was throwing my way,” Brown-Berchtold says. “This wasn't a job that I was looking for, but it was the job that was presented to me.”
Networking can be a great tool that can yield some interesting career opportunities, Osbourne-Roberts explains. “That really was an initial step getting out there, ensuring that I had some administrative leadership skills and putting myself out in front of people through those opportunities,” he said about his personal experiences.
And for Marker, perhaps the unexpected is to find revitalization in your current position. “If you're feeling frustrated with the role that you have right now, and that's why you are considering a change in your career, first of all,” he says, “work with somebody who you really trust to make sure you're not experiencing some burnout, that you can work with that and perhaps be perfectly joyful where you are.”
While money shouldn’t be the sole factor of deciding your job direction, all three Inside Family Medicine hosts agreed that making career decisions without considering the financial implications would be a mistake. “We really can't ignore the financial considerations that come with career or job transitions,” Brown-Berchtold stresses.
Financial literacy is a key skill for family physicians, and it is often an underdeveloped one that can play into stereotypes about physician lifestyles — which can limit your career options. “In the absence of financial education for our doctors, we end up getting into situations where physicians feel handcuffed into one life, one lifestyle and one job that will allow that,” Brown-Berchtold says.
Additionally, being flexible and thinking about money as a component of your career and not the end goal can help with options. “There’s lots of different financial models that we work in and we're suddenly so comfortable with that that it's hard to imagine getting into a different financial model, and I don't want that to be the thing that holds a person back from a really important career transition,” Marker says.
“The money is not a good reason to keep yourself in a bad place emotionally with the work that you're doing.”
Non-clinician roles can vary widely, but Osbourne-Roberts makes an astute and often overlooked observation about family physicians working in a clinical practice and how that can relate to non-clinical work. “We are technically blue collar workers,” he explains. “You don’t work, you don’t get paid.
“But the advantage to that, and people forget about this, is that if you are a blue collar professional, particularly a licensed blue collar professional, you have the opportunity to move into and out of different situations. You can hang your own shingle, you can work for someone else, you can change the capacity in which you work for someone else.”
So for family physicians interested in moving out of a clinical setting and into a non-clinical setting, Osbourne-Roberts recommends trying to set aside enough time — preferably 20% of full time — to maintain a clinical practice. “It provides the opportunity to, if you will, always have a solid craft that for either emotional, financial or other reasons you can dial up or dial down in ways that you're getting up in the morning and going off somewhere to help somebody.”
“One of those common themes is that in any transition there are both opportunities and there are challenges,” Osbourne-Roberts says. Fortunately, family physicians aren’t alone as they decide on key transitions — there are plenty of partners and resources to assist.
Brown-Berchtold emphasizes processing the emotional transitions through coaching and using your friends and family as sounding boards. “I am a firm believer in physician coaching, whether that's career coaching or just coaching around the emotional transitions you’re making,” she says. “I’m also a firm believer in therapy and having partners who are external that are really partnering along with you.”
Using the tools at your disposal is important. “There’s lots of good material out there,” Marker says. He also recommends the resources that AAFP provides, and says he has used them for years. “When I launched out from residency, I bought a spiral-bound book from the AAFP on how to start your own private practice. Thankfully, we've come a long way since then. Now there's this whole AAFP career link, which is at aafpcareerlink.org, and it is chock-full of resources… If you're looking for some of those things about CVs and how I understand my work with recruiters later on beyond residency, I would start there.”
Family physicians looking for jobs and employers looking for qualified candidates can take advantage of AAFP Career Link resources. Employers can post jobs and view resumes, and applicants can search jobs, access a career planning portal, set job alerts and more.
Job searchers can also join the AAFP Virtual Career Fair, which will be held May 6 from 5 to 8 p.m. CT. Virtual walk-ins will be welcome, but those signing up early can upload their CV so employers can review it in advance.