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Coordinators as self-advocates

Residency Program Insider, September 9, 2020

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Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from The Residency Coordinators Handbook, Fourth Edition. For more information about this book, click here.

One of the best ways coordinators can promote themselves is to become proactive learners. Advocate for learning opportunities for yourself and your peers. Look at professional development courses and seminars offered by your institution. Consider participating in workshops to grow professionally and use what you learn to improve your working environment or practices. Similarly, attend national GME meetings. These meetings are a resource for coordinators to network with peers and discuss common responsibilities. They also provide leadership opportunities.

Another way to promote yourself is to make others aware of what you do. Talk about your job and the many administrative functions you perform. Most human resource departments do not know exactly what the program coordinator job entails.

Review your job description so that it adequately reflects your responsibilities. Look closely at the wording; you may need to change the action verbs to reflect managerial tasks as opposed to clerical tasks. For example, a phrase such as “update program database systems on a regular basis” makes the function sound clerical in nature. Instead, change it to sound more managerial, such as “manage the database systems; analyze and report results.”

To find the right words for your job description, consider accessing Bloom’s Taxonomy. This is a classification of the higher levels of learning that require more complex cognitive processes. Also look at job descriptions your institution has for managers and administrators. Use the same phrasing to describe your job functions.

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