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In full-time employment, you have the tremendous benefit of (relative) job security.
Whether or not your job is secure in medicine, at least you feel like it is.
And given the uptick in demand for procedural services, and healthcare in general given our aging population, it’s easy to feel confident that you have control over your employment assuming you stay on the straight and narrow.
But as we have discussed before, your trade for being an employee and enjoying greater job security is a certain degree of autonomy, your time, or your pay.
Risk mitigation
The downside of the locum contract way of life (or at least one of the major downsides) is that you have no such level of job security.
Newsletter #009 – Locum Horror Stories included this sentiment in the case of Natalia who learned the hard way the limits of contract work.
The take home messages were:
- credential at multiple places
- have privileges at multiple places
- supplement with a part-time w2 job
- vet each opportunity better before signing on
This advice still stands.
If you don’t take this advice, you might be lucky for a while, but eventually your luck will run out.
But what happens if you do?
What happens if you always try to keep 2 or 3 or 4 positions available to you at a time?
Well, things can get quite sticky, if not plain busy.
A good problem to have
I know that I made the leap into locum contract work in order to spend less time working and more time with family, friends, and myself.
But some of you are in it for the money.
There can be a terrific discrepancy in pay between employed and contract work in many specialties. (In anesthesiology it is regularly as large as 50% more earned per hour).
If you fall into that camp, then the more work you have the better.
But if you’re like me, then you begin to complicate your life very quickly the more opportunities you take on.
There is a fine balance to be struck, especially if you find multiple enjoyable assignments locally.
So what can you do if you’ve hedged the ever-present impending end to one assignment by credentialing at 2 others? Furthermore, what do you do when that first job never ends? How do you fit all the options into your schedule when you were supposed to be taking time for yourself and your family?
My advice is you take what you can, when you can.
It’s the fickle nature of contract work that necessitates this way of mitigating the risk inherent to the lifestyle.
This is the trade-off that you’ve signed up for.
There will be both feast and famine in exchange for a level of personal/professional sovereignty.
It’s a good problem to have.
And at this point, I am not willing to trade sovereignty for security.
Whenever you’re ready, here are 2 ways I can help:
1) Let’s talk through what choosing your own path through medicine looks like. Over the phone, confidential, free:
https://calendly.com/tonyvullo/20min
2) Free Guides and Resources to Help You Reclaim Your Time and Autonomy:
