Plan C: What to do when your side gig gets sidetracked

During and immediately after the COVID pandemic, sick care professional interest in side gigs, hustles, and non-clinical roles exploded. At least that's the impression you would get if you inventoried all the stories and content about side gigs, dropouts, polls indicating how many doctors intended to quit, and the exponential rise in the number of burnout, executive, and life coaches.

Mea culpa.

In the short term, interest in and the pursuit of non-clinical careers goes in cycles since it is intimately linked to the microeconomics of side gigs and the factors impacting the short- and long-term supply and demand for consulting, advisory, or management team services.

Longer term, students, trainees, and clinicians want to do more than direct patient clinical care. They are looking for exit ramps to supplement their clinical activities. Medical schools have not responded so the leaks in the workforce pipeline are getting bigger as more medical students either don't finish or don't apply for a residency or don't complete one if they do.

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Here are the drivers of medical student, resident, and early-mid career clinician non-clinical careers.

1. Student debt burden and the long education and training requirements
2. A toxic education culture
3. Decreasing attractiveness of practicing clinical medicine
4. Decreasing compensation given the long work hour requirements
5. High burnout rates
6. More and more alternative non-clinical career opportunities that enable doctors to leverage their talents
7. Lack of faculty support and flexibility in medical school education programs for students interested in physician entrepreneurship and non-clinical careers
8. The rise of digital health and sick care startups
9. The demand for physician input early in the all phases of new product development
10. Constantly evolving new jobs in industry
11. The rise of the clinical medical management establishment creating physician administrators

12. Care delivery substitutes, such as nurse practitioners and physician assistants and new business models that are increasingly disintermediating doctors

13. Generational attitudes about work, work-life balance, purpose and meaning.

14. The COVID pandemic exposing huge gaps in the US sickcare system of systems crying out for solutions

15. Medical students with premedical school experiences in entrepreneurship

16. The dreaded "D's": Disease, death in the family, disability, disciplinary action, divorce, dumped by your employer, lack of demand for your clinical services, displacement by advanced practice nurses or other technological substitutes.

Besides that, we don't have valid data reporting how many of the roughly 1M active clinicians in the US have successful side gigs, their descriptions and effort and whether they were successful in the short or long term.

People say one thing and do another. Here are some reasons why doctors didn't quit medicine like they said they would in a moment of passion, frustration and anger.

According to recent reports, after a year of right sizing, employers are looking in the mirror and concluding there is still fat to lose. ?

Companies including Amedzon, Google and others tech companies this month have announced plans to trim their workforces. Some of the companies now cutting jobs conducted larger-scale layoffs over the past year or so. Since then, inflation has come downalong with expectations for a recession, which most economists anticipated as recently as the middle of last year.?

You probably already know that startup investors put much less money to work in 2023. But Crunchbase data shows some investors slowed down much less drastically than others — leading to a major reshuffling of the most-active startup investor ranks. Plus, we look at what happened with financial services startups in 2023 and what areas of fintech investors say could get more attention this year. And in another sign of an IPO market thaw in 2024, a stablecoin startup files to go public.

What hasn’t changed, according to the steady drumbeat of layoff news in the first two weeks of January, is corporate America’s focus on efficiency and commitment to do more with less.?

That includes doing more with fewer advisors, consultants and doctors looking for jobs or giving their white coat advisors the pink slip too.

Doctor Plan B is about hedging your clinical career bets.

Plan C is what you should do when your side gig gets sidetracked:

1. What to do when your white coat gets the pink slip.
2. Revisit the 6Rs of career transitioning
3. Revisit your personal financial plan
4. Monitor the economy to plan for next steps
5. Here is a side gig resource guide to a recession
6. Continue to build your personal brand, since you put that on the back burner once you got a job
7. Learn from your experience.
8. Don't be consumed with regrets
9. Add your experience to your failure and gap resume
10. Document the gaps you closed in your personal and professional development plan and the competencies you learned that are transferable to your next role.
11. Rethink your compensation demands
12. Spend more time developing your internal and external networks
13. Appoint and consult with your personal advisory board
14. Thank your mentors
15. Try different roles, holes and goals
16. There is always AI

There is a time for everything, so be persistent, patient, and persevere. Continue to make it personal but don't take it personally. Prepare for when your former client or boss wants you back.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack