August 2016

Help Sophie decide which medical specialty she should choose, by gathering and visualising data on the long term (consultant) prospects of each option.

My partner Sophie has just finished her FY2 training, and now needs to decide which area of medicine to specialise in before applying for her next job.

We sat down to understand the timeline of each choice, including particular milestones (e.g. reaching Reg, reaching Consultant), and also mapped out the pros and cons of each choice as Soph saw them.

We then needed to get a more long term view of the choices, looking at the ‘end game’ consultant prospects for each one. We considered what aspects were important, including gender balance, competition ratios, availability of part time working and potential for private work. I then set out to harvest public data to try and answer these questions, and ultimately combined these datasets to create a Tableau dashboard which Soph could use to help make her choice!

See the Dashboard live on Tableau Public