Starting a new opportunity or whole career path can seem overwhelming. There are valuable lessons we can learn through practice and experience, but perhaps it can help to gain insight — why not try to make the process a little smoother?

Here are some tips I can give to an aspiring medical writer to help one grow in the trade:

• Be proactive
  • Show that you want to learn by sitting in on meetings, getting involved in new or unfamiliar tasks, etc.
  • Find ways to make your managers/directors work easier
  • Learn to anticipate potential roadblocks such as deadline shifts, need for additional resources, etc.
• Make a habit of continuing to grow your skills
  • Take advantage of opportunities to learn new skills or refine existing ones through workshops, tutorials or other hands-on learning activities
  • Incorporate writing skills and techniques in your work when possible
  • Identify areas of self-improvement and try to build-in ways to improve with your everyday tasks (e.g., reaching out to members of different departments such as account or editorial for collaboration and clarification to build communications skills and grow inter-agency connection)
• Learn from your colleagues
  • Be open to advice, suggestions, and even professional critique
  • Implement some strategies from other team members that seem compatible with your work style and/or skillset or consider modifying your habits if needed
  • Seek guidance from others on types of work that they have experience in (e.g., modeling content, such as prompts for ad board discussions, by using guidance from a seasoned clinical director who has previously facilitated content for multiple ad boards in the disease state)
• Build yourself as a valued resource for your team
  • Offer clinical insight whenever you get the opportunity (whether you can help clarify referencing during MLR submission or refine a response to a client query)
  • Contribute during team meetings and status updates
  • Show reasonable flexibility around timelines and try to work with the team to ensure efficient routing
• Attention-to-detail
  • Ensure your work has been reviewed effectively before handing off to a superior or submitting to a client (consider using a checklist)
  • Maintain accuracy in your deliverables by adhering to standards of practice (SOPs) related to editorial checks and clinical annotations
  • Be organized when referencing and annotating to ensure more efficient and productive submission — we, as medical writers, typically own the responsibility for this part of the process