Give your career a shot in the arm

People who work in the health service have a keen sense of the organisation’s purpose ­ – and the important role that it has in society. This awareness can be highly motivating, but there are other reasons why the health sector is widely seen as an attractive place to work.

One of these is that the health service is regarded as one of the more stable sectors of the economy. In these times of financial uncertainty, this can seem particularly appealing. But I think people should understand the true nature of this stability. There is a certain level of stability in our strategic planning, and we can commit to reasonably forward-looking IT strategies because of this.

Obviously, some things change from month to month, depending on decisions taken by the NHS Executive, but in the area where I work ­ – software development – ­ it means we have a good indication of what projects we are expected to deliver.

Like a lot of my colleagues within NHS Blood & Transplant, I didn’t start out in IT. Historically, the health service has attracted a lot of people with a scientific and numerate mindset. For many of those people, work increasingly involved the use of computers, and they realised that a career in computing had a strong appeal.

Now, that sort of route into IT has more or less disappeared. Business IT has developed into a massively complicated entity. You have technology stacks, processes, platforms and regulations that are all intertwined. Because of that, it is far more uncommon to recruit non-IT professionals.

As part of the overall NHS Agenda for Change, there has been a great deal of focus on the professionalisation of IT. By this I mean that job roles have become defined in far more detail.

This feeds into the overall Knowledge Skills Framework ­ – a mechanism to ensure that departments know what skills they need and what skills they have. Each member of staff then has an annual personal review and from that we create a personal development plan.

This type of career development is definitely maturing in the health service. The idea of having this type of plan is not new, but we have become much better at it, and we have become much better at linking it to the overall strategic objectives of the organisation.

When it comes to potential recruits, there are some obvious baseline requirements, such as technical skills. But while the precise technical skills vary, depending on the type of IT role you’re looking at, there are some “soft” skills that I always look for.

One of the crucial things I look for in candidates is good communication skills. Working
in the health service involves dealing with colleagues from a wide variety of professions and backgrounds. You can be dealing with junior ancillary staff or the most senior medics; they have a range of working styles. Being able to communicate effectively has become an essential part of delivering a high-quality IT service.

I also look at people’s motivation. Generally, it is the people who can demonstrate an interest in the work and an appreciation of our value to society who stand out.

And personal motivation is important. One of the best things for me ­ and one of the reasons why I have stayed in the health sector ­ is because of the people. I think it is generally true that the people who work here are not solely motivated by money. In some other sectors, that financial motivation can mean that people become almost ruthless about enhancing their career. In the health service, we encourage development, but it is done within the framework of a common ethos.

Steve Carroll is a software development manager at NHS Blood & Transplant