Our annual, widely popular CV Writing and Interview Skills workshop was held last month as many cohorts of medical people began the annual process of applying for jobs, in particular our final year students looking to start their internship.
Despite being unable to run the event in its usual format due to COVID-19, we endeavoured to transform it into a virtual event complete with two webinars, the ‘VMWS Guide to CV Writing and Successful Interviews’ PDF and a personalised CV Feedback service headed by our very own A/Prof Deb Colville. In particular, we ensured that this resource pack was relevant to the internship application process, which has undergone multiple changes this year.
The CV Writing and Cover Letter Webinar was conducted by the lovely Dr Rachael Coutts, an Emergency Physician at the Northern Hospital who is also the Northern Health Associate Director of Medical Education, where she oversees the education, supervision and training of junior doctors. Our Interview Skills Webinar was conducted by equally popular, A/Prof Louisa Ng, a Rehabilitation Physician at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. Additionally, A/Prof Ng is the Deputy Director (Sub-Dean) at the University of Melbourne’s RMH clinical school, and has been the Supervisor of Intern Training at RMH, a position she has had for the last 10 years.
In light of the recent events, VMWS recognised the vulnerable position that many of our members may be in, particularly our student community where many have lost placements and part time employment. As such, we decided to run this event free of charge for VMWS members and it was a great success.
We had 35 new memberships and an overwhelming amount of interest for our CV Feedback Service, with 54 registrations of interest. We hope that our resource pack has been informative for all our members and we’d like to once again thank the guest speakers who volunteered their time to head our webinars.