Joey talked about the moment he realised his CV needed to use data to show outcomes he created, not just list his duties. I want to show you what that looks like in practice, cos it took me a few goes to get it right.
In 2022 I applied for a Project Manager role at a Local Health District. Health Manager Level 3 - which at the time was paying $119k. At that time I'd spent the vast majority of my career as a physio. I had never held a PM title in my life, but was so stoked when I got the job 🤯
Here's one of the selection criteria and what I actually wrote.
The question: "Relevant combination of qualifications and work experience applying best-practice project and change management methodologies to bring about organisational improvement."
Reading that as a clinician, your brain goes blank. Change management methodologies? Organisational improvement? I'd heard the terms before but it wasn't really what I did - I mostly saw patients.
But I'd spent three years as a part of a hip fracture improvement project at our Hospital. The team had built an early activation care bundle called eHip to better meet the Hip Fracture clinical care standards - the physio relevant part was getting patients mobilising on day one after surgery. I scheduled stakeholder meetings with surgeons, nurses, and the executive team. I led a physio department prioritisation system review and presented the results at a state-wide ACI webinar sharing we'd improved day one mobilisation from 63% to 93% without any extra staff or funding.
Which IS project and change management.
So instead of writing "I managed a caseload of acute orthopaedic patients and attended MDT meetings", I wrote about the 30% improvement, the stakeholder engagement, the evidence-based methodology and the measurable outcome.
The other thing that helped: I'd completed every free course that was relevant through My Health Learning (Accelerated Implementation Methodology, Redesign Methodology, Introduction to Improvement Science) plus enrolled in a Diploma of Project Management through TAFE (this was Government funded). I did those to show I was motivated, self learner and to get the vocabulary to describe things I'd done as a clinician in language that the Project Management Office wanted to read.
So if you're thinking you don't have the right experience for non-clinical roles, you probably do - you just need to reflect on your career with a different lense.
This first went out to Post-MDT subscribers on 12 July 2026. You can read the original edition in the archive, or get the next one in your inbox.