I chatted to Joey who spent eleven years as a physio. 7 of those were as a senior in ED (I swear I haven't just found clones of me 😅). He loved the autonomy, loved not knowing what was coming through the door, but eventually hit the zone where everything just felt way too same same to keep going.
So he started looking, initially not outside the hospital but at internal secondments - project roles, service roles anything that wasn't full clinical. He applied for ten, maybe fifteen internal non-clinical roles across NSW Health. The feedback was always the same: you don't have enough project experience.
Which is a fun little catch-22 when nobody will give you the project experience in the first place.
So he decided to take a project management course through TAFE (which at the time was free). Landed a secondment with the Voluntary Assisted Dying Service and got some experience, when it wrapped he kept applying, and got a few more knock backs.
One thing that kept tripping him up was the CV. In clinical most folks write about what they did - how they ran wards, attended MDTs, managed caseloads. The non-clinical world wants to know what changed cos of you. That you reduced readmissions by X%, improved discharge rates, that kind of thing. Joey reckons he'd never thought about his work that way before, not when applying for clinical roles, but once he started reframing it, the responses changed.
Eventually he started looking outside the health system entirely. Got on LinkedIn (which was brand new territory for him - and yep found it awkward). Started reaching out to people in consultancy through a friend of a friend who'd already made the jump.
He applied for a health planner role at a consultancy firm. Went through the whole process - interviews, take-home task, the lot. Didn't end up getting it though cos the firm didn't win the project.
A few months later a different company posted the same role - health planner, hospital redevelopments. He applied and got it.
In a plot twist the company that hired him was the one that won the contract over the first firm. You could say the universe planned for him to be working on that project all along.
Now he spends his days being the translator between clinicians and architects, helping design what the next generation of hospitals will look like. He gets to use his clinical experience in a totally different way. He's kept his rego and picks up the odd weekend shift, but no plans to go back.
Salary-wise it was a horizontal move from Level 4 AHP, but that's the base level he now has room to actually get a pay rise - which he never had in clinical.
Joey reckons the biggest shift was this: "We think that's all we can do. We can only work in a hospital. But these skills are so transferable - you've just got to spin them a bit."
Next: what the CV line with the data in it looks like in practice, from my own application.
This first went out to Post-MDT subscribers on 5 July 2026. You can read the original edition in the archive, or get the next one in your inbox.