This page gives career information of relevance to Imperial Postgraduate Medicine Students.

You can find out how the Careers Service supports Imperial students on our Services for students webpage, explore our career events, attend one-to-one appointments and sign up for our weekly newsletter, sent every Thursday (sign up by checking the relevant box on your personal profile on JobsLive). Whatever stage you are at with your studies, we’re here to help from day one of your Master's programme right through to PhD studies.

You have access to an online learning course called Attributes and Aspirations (AA). This course will help you be a better student by supporting your transferable (e.g. project management, communication, critical thinking) skills and take you through career planning using specific examples relevant to post-graduate medicine. Be sure to access the right version of AA for you, choosing either the Master's version or the PhD version of modules to enrol in.

Imperial students in a labWhat can you do with a Postgraduate Medicine degree?

Postgraduate medicine graduates have a wide range of career options. Some choose to continue using their medical related knowledge in their career, and others choose to change direction after graduation. Many graduates choose to continue onto PhD study. You can explore where our graduates end up further through our postgraduate What do imperial graduates do? webpage. Use the resources below to help you start to explore and understand your options and to begin to develop your career plans.

tabs - pg medicine

Develop your skills

Whilst Postgraduate medicine covers a wide range of programmes, you will gain the following skills and understandings during your studies. All of these can be used if you choose to stay within your field of study, or move into different areas.

Knowledge and Understanding of:

The range of topics and experimental approaches relevant to your area of study. Having an overall understanding of the research process enables you to:
(i) Evaluate critically
(ii) Evaluate methodologies, process and systems and critique them
(iii) Design and conduct appropriate research and investigations

Transferable Skills:

  • A broad understanding and the ability to critically evaluate knowledge and processes
  •  The ability to plan and carry out a project
  • Experience of a wide range of experimental techniques, either laboratory-based, computer-based or both
  • Adapting plans to solve problems
  • Management and communication skills, including collaboration, decision making, time management, written and oral reporting

Support to develop your skills further

A skills audit may help you better understand what skills you have. This also forms a good starting point to structure a CV. From here you can see where you may want to build up specific skills and look for opportunities to do this. Some good starting points could be:

  • The Attributes and Aspirations short course can help you to develop all of these transferable skills and more
  • The Graduate School offers a range of extra support covering both research specific and building industry knowledge and transferable skills
  • The Careers Service offers skills workshops to help you with the basics of how to communicate your skills during applications, whether you’re applying for academic or industry positions.
Explore career areas

As a Postgraduate Medicine graduate you can go into huge range of careers, from research in your specific area all the way through to non-related careers such as management consultancy and charity related work. Apart from the other tabs on this page, here are some great starting points to help you explore further:

  • The Attributes and Aspirations short course has a module on Career Planning with specific units about exploring career options. This has many links relevant postgraduate medicine.
  • Our What do Imperial Graduates Do? page contains our Graduate Outcomes data which gives examples of employers and further study options of previous graduates.
  • Explore the Imperial College LinkedIn to learn about career paths of alumni from your programme as their careers develop over time.

Our exploring options page can help you to formulate a process to explore a range of careers. You can also meet employers from many of these areas through Careers Service events and fairs which are advertised on JobsLive and in our weekly newsletter.

Professional bodies

A professional body, association or society seeks to further a particular profession and the interests of individuals engaged in that profession. The body maintains an oversight of the knowledge, skills, conduct and practice of that profession and can offer accreditation or chartership. You can often use professional bodies to access training, networking events and explore related career options. Association websites also often have lists of their members which are very useful to find a range of employers in a specific industry.

Due to the huge range of topics covered by postgraduate medicine, it’s impossible to supply a complete list of professional associations. However, there are a few links below to give you some ideas. Try asking your supervisor or lecturers which associations they value within your subjects or a Google search could reveal organisations related to very specific topics.

Industry links

Your postgraduate medicine degree is valued by all areas of industry from larger well-known Multinational Companies (MNCs) to Small or Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs), defined as organisations with fewer than 250 employees.

MCNs generally have large budgets to promote their jobs and these adverts can often be found on websites such as Prospects, targetjobs, LinkedIn or Gradcracker. They also often have large graduate programmes which you’ll find information about on company websites. Be aware of the timelines of when MCNs tend to recruit as they often do this a year in advance.

SMEs can be harder to find and they often rely on you approaching them speculatively to show motivation and interest. They will sometimes engage with universities through incubation hubs to help them grow skills and expertise. The Imperial Enterprise Lab often run events to help students understand and network with SME and start-up communities.

Below are useful websites to find SMEs relevant to postgraduate medicine. More links can be found in the Career Planning Module of the Attributes and Aspiration course:

SMEs can also be found using Google Maps by running a search for a specific term (e.g. “Neuroscience”) in geographic areas where you would like to work or where you know one organisation is. Often SMEs will cluster together geographically around a larger organisation related to their work, from hospitals to transport hubs.

LinkedIn is also a good tool to discover SMEs. Explore the profiles of different people who have roles in which you are interested and scroll down their profile to see where they have worked. You may find SMEs and other interesting organisations that you did not know about. To get better at using LinkedIn, attend a Careers Essentials: LinkedIn course. The Attributes and Aspirations short course has a unit on Networking in its Introductory module for further support.

If you're interested in learning more about the stakeholders and stages involved in public health, the following online publications can help get you started:

Academia links

Many postgraduate medicine graduates continue on into academia. If you are a master's student you’ll need to do a PhD to achieve this and PhD students will generally move into Postdoc research roles as their first step. The Medical Research Council have created an interactive careers pathway which can help you understand this. Other useful websites related to academia are:

  • Vitae – focuses specifically on developing researchers and includes a range of resources including how to be more competitive in academic applications, case studies of researchers and example application documents.
  • Find a PhD and Find a Postdoc both list funded opportunities and have careers advice pages on writing research proposals and more.
  • Job.ac.uk – the biggest advertiser of roles within Universities and research
  • Any relevant research councils – for example the MRC is the main funder of medically related research in the UK. If you are looking internationally, find the organisation that funds most of your research in that country.
  • GoinGlobal – for international opportunities which you can search by country.

A large part of moving forward in academia is having the right networks, so websites like LinkedIn and ResearchGate should form an important role in your career development. Talk to your current supervisor or others within your group to figure out who you'd like to meet and how to make it happen. For further support, the Attributes and Aspirations short course has a unit on networking in the Introductory module.

Next steps

Career planning often takes time and can sometimes feel overwhelming. It’s a good idea to set aside a small amount of time on a regular basis to maintain momentum. Below are some things to get you started:

  • Visit the Career planning webpage on our website to listen to a short video about how to get started
  • Sign up to the Imperial Careers Newsletter by checking the relevant box on your personal profile on JobsLive
  • The Attributes and Aspirations short course has a Careers Planning module which can take you step by step through the process. If you already know what you want to do, you can learn how to get there in the CV and Applications and Interview modules.
  • Learn about the timescales for applying for further study, work experience and graduate employment
  • See our What's on webpages to find out about the different types of events that we run, including workshops, careers fairs, career talks, and hear from alumni and employers about different types of work.
  • Learn the skills that will help you succeed on the job market in the Applications and interviews section of our website, and by attending our skills training and workshops.

If you feel stuck with your career planning, you could book a one-to-one appointment to talk it through with a careers consultant. Katie Dallison and Becky Guppy are the careers consultants for postgraduate medicine but you can see any of our consultants for your first appointment.