Blog
25 October 2026 · Australia

Know you can do the job,
but keep getting rejected?

Their biggest project sat behind two words: “departmental resource”.

The short version

Two readers told me this week that their non-clinical applications keep getting knocked back, even though they know their skills transfer.

A physio’s CV I reviewed shows why. A state-wide service they’d been selected for was hidden mid-sentence behind “departmental resource”, with no numbers to prove what it did.

We cut the CV from 108 lines to 78, rewrote 64 of them, and found 29 places to add the data that proves the skills they say they have.

Two allied health professionals messaged me this week about non-clinical job applications, and one of them put it like this:

“I also try to note it in my cover letters how my current clinical skills and problem solving can help contribute to jobs i applied for. Most of the time I get a generalised reply saying I have not made to the next stage. So I guess I’m stuck.”

The other said:

“feel confident I have transferable skills, just not sure on how to identify all of them”

And they are not alone. A few weeks ago I reviewed a physio’s CV against a job ad they were keen to apply for, and here’s just one of the edits we made:

Before:

“Departmental resource for specialist equipment and management, managing the state-wide service including patient assessment, exercise and education classes, data collection, telehealth.”

After:

“Selected by EOI to a state-wide specialist service: managed patient assessment, exercise and education classes, telehealth and data collection for [n] patients a [week / year].”

One of their biggest scale projects - a state-wide service they’d been picked for - sat mid-sentence behind “departmental resource”. The data that proved their impact was missing and nobody reading it would ever know how capable they were. Cue the generic “thanks but no thanks” application rejection.

Their original CV came in at 108 lines and we cut it to 78, completely rewrote 64 of those lines, and gave them 29 gaps to fill with data that proved they had the transferable skills they said they did.

Translating your clinical skills into language that hiring managers for non-clinical roles look for and value is week 2 of my 1:1 mentoring pilot. We build you a master CV - and you learn how to tailor it for each of the non-clinical roles you apply for.

See all the deets here 💅

Next: another CV review, where the project work sat at the bottom of page 3.

This first went out to Post-MDT subscribers on 25 October 2026. You can read the original edition in the archive, or get the next one in your inbox.

Read enough? Go find the role.

The blog is the why. The guide and the quiz are the which: the non-clinical roles your clinical training actually maps to, and what it costs (in time and money) to get there.

GET THE GUIDE Guide $29 → 20 roles with the honest parts nobody puts in the JD. AU salary data, realistic pathways, skill translations. TAKE THE QUIZ Quiz → Find out which non-clinical roles match your clinical strengths. GET THE NEWSLETTER Newsletter → Honest, practical notes on the pivot, straight to your inbox.