Worked example — career exploration

Where a profile points, before a single application.

J. Doe has spent eleven years in medical affairs — a PhD scientist, then a medical science liaison, now leading field medical for an oncology portfolio. For eight months the applications have gone to Medical Affairs Director roles, and they have not landed. Eight months of applications is not a small experiment. The question this answers is not “how do I write this better” but “where does this history actually carry weight, and how much is open there right now”.

Medical affairsStrong61 live
Market access & pricingStrong34 live
Commercial strategyModerate28 live
Clinical development operationsModerate22 live
Product management, life sciencesStretch47 live

Bands are the profile scored against each family; the counts are roles open in that family at the time of the read. Stretch is shown at the same weight as Strong. A direction you can see and judge is worth more than one that has been quietly greyed out, and the whole point of the read is to widen what is in view. Figures here are an illustration — your own are computed from your history against the live corpus.

Market access & pricing was never searched for. It does not contain the words on J. Doe's last contract, so no keyword search would return it — and it scores Strong on eleven years of evidence work that a market-access team is paid to do. That is the difference between a job board and a read of the market: the board answers what you typed.

Health-technology assessment submissions68% of postingsMet
Payer value narrative development61% of postingsMet
Health economics and outcomes research collaboration54% of postingsMet
Cross-market launch experience32% of postingsMet
Pricing strategy ownership47% of postingsNot met
Reimbursement negotiation lead41% of postingsNot met

Frequencies are how often each requirement appears across the postings in that family; verdicts are that requirement scored against J. Doe's own history. Four of six already answered. The two that are not are both about owning the commercial decision rather than building the case behind it — which is the real distance to cover, stated as a fact rather than a discouragement.

Next: the decision on one role →