Harvesting Knowledge In Your Career

Building a career as a health practitioner should be a structured process. As I outline in “The Health Practitioners' Journey,” structuring your career in stages of development can lead to a satisfying and financially rewarding path. I outline four stages and see the journey taking a linear approach where you move from one stage to the next. This approach may not suit everyone, but most of us will seek to harvest knowledge on the journey, whichever direction it takes us.

Harvesting knowledge involves approaching your career and experiences as opportunities to learn, experiment, and expand your understanding. If you embrace your journey this way, you'll be well-equipped to take advantage of any opportunities that may arise during your career. This is the key to success, opportunity, and fulfillment across all stages of your career. It ensures not only commercial and professional success but also personal growth and satisfaction.

Many practitioners who have ‘harvested’ well have seized or created amazing opportunities. These include positions in corporate healthcare companies, developing courses to teach their unique skills, or using their harvested skills to embark on new directions, such as speaking at events or becoming facilitators or consultants for similar businesses. As the industry constantly evolves, new innovations arise. For example, AI is becoming more widely adopted, enhancing operational efficiency in our practices.

The above may sound reasonable and achievable, but there are examples where practitioners have taken on too much and pursued opportunities they weren't fully equipped to handle. This happened to me early in my career when I was thrust into managing a sports medicine business without the necessary knowledge, training, or experience. Fortunately, with support from mentors, I learned as I went along. I continued with my clinical practice while harvesting more knowledge, attending courses, reading widely, and listening intently to those with greater expertise. This path eventually improved my competence.

Throughout your career, continue to apply your skills to various opportunities, putting the concept of harvesting knowledge into practice. Here are some key takeaways to ensure you make the most of the knowledge you’ve harvested:

• Develop a Continuous Plan: Ensure you have a plan that involves developing your clinical skills throughout your career.

• Understand Commercial Success: Gain an understanding of what is involved in achieving commercial success.

• Network: Build connections with colleagues in your profession and those in related fields.

• Seek Mentors: Find mentors to guide you through different stages of your career.

• Enrol in Courses: Start with courses in your area of interest, then progressively take courses that broaden your knowledge and challenge you.

• Be Present to Opportunity: Always be aware of opportunities. Luck is often just the awareness of an opportunity and the willingness to act on it.

Too often, people miss out on important opportunities due to a lack of awareness. For example, I once shared a room at a conference with someone I didn’t know. That chance encounter led to the establishment of a sports medicine clinic and a move from Adelaide to Melbourne a few months later.

By following these guidelines, your career will become dynamic and fulfilling. Embrace the harvesting process: seeds sown in autumn will sprout in spring, but you must be aware enough to plant the seeds at the right time!

Mentoring at LifeCare Health

Over the last few years at LifeCare we have introduced a mentoring system into the Physiotherapy and Sports Medicine practices that we own and operate. Moving from an informal, non structured process to a system that dictated how we were to mentor and at what specific times was a challenge for me. I had been used to a more ad hoc, slightly hit and miss approach, which had a degree of success but never created a predictable, sustainable result that improved the retention and development of clinicians in the business. We decided to review the results of the system and found some interesting items. In summary those who engaged with the program (completed documents, attended mentor and other education sessions and were generally and genuinely seen to apply what they learnt) were found to have measures that were around 20% better than those who did not. In other words the anecdotal improvements we observed we confirmed by analysis.

We continue to grow and develop the system we have and believe that effective mentoring from those who have the experience and follow the system is the key to success in Health practice. If you want to know more I recommend you email me and I will provide the results of our study to you.