These 6 Soft Skills Will Transform You as A Medical Writer

Medical writing has gained a lot of popularity lately and is being opted as a career by many. As a result of this, the competition in this field is increasing by many folds with each passing day. People from the various backgrounds are opting medical writing as their career. In this case, being from the life sciences or medical background might give you some edge over the others but won’t entirely make you stand out from the rest. Even if you have experience in scientific/medical writing, your continued success is not guaranteed.

Alike other industries, the pharma and healthcare industry are now looking for various skills in medical writers and are placing a higher value on their recruits/candidates who possess soft skills.
Many key opinion leaders and business leaders believe that soft skills are more crucial today as compared to hard skills. Your soft skills are the interpersonal traits and your character attributes that determine how you are with other people.

Soft skills cannot really be taught. They more or less reflect the kind of person you are and the attitude one possesses is extremely important to the workplace as it reflects in the working of the individual as well. While hard skills like technical know-how, digital capability, and expertise, qualification in medical and life sciences, etc. can help you with your career as a medical writer, what might ensure your success in the longer run, are your soft skills. You can work on developing your soft skills and make them better so that they can complement your hard skills.

Mentioned below are 6 soft skills that will establish you as a successful medical writer:

1. Problem-solving skills: In this competitive era, it is very important to have problem-solving skills. The level of persistence determines the level of your success. The ability to offer solutions to an existing problem is what makes the difference. In the field of medical communications, the art of problem-solving involves both creativity and versatility. These skills are needed for on track medico-marketing, healthcare education, healthcare social media, public relations, peer-review in publishing and another medical affair. Healthcare and pharma companies hunt for writers who have a critical approach and can see different aspects of a problem from varied perspectives and work on it. It means that as a medical writer you might have to step into the shoes of a patient or researcher so that you can inculcate a fresh approach to brief a complex communication. You are required to simplify complex information and data so that patients and the public can understand the diagnoses or doctor’s instructions.

2. Flexibility: If you are from a medical background, you would be aware of the medical terminologies and various therapeutic areas. You might even hold expertise in a specific therapeutic domain. It is essential in today’s times to be a jack of all trades, i.e. it will do you some major good if you explore other therapeutic areas as well and expand your horizons as a medical writer. The pharma industry is dynamic in nature. This demands the medical writers to be more adaptable and to be able to quickly get hold of the latest research findings or related customer trends. Adapting key messages from clinical publications for medical editorials, healthcare videos or company websites, etc. are some of the things expected from medical writers now. 

3. The ability to correlate or associate: Communication is very important today. The fast-paced healthcare communication firms want dynamism in their writers and good communication is an important skill being looked for. An efficient medical writer should be able to establish connections with people, both online and offline. You require good communication skills, whether you are explaining any idea to your seniors, making a presentation, sharing drafts with editors or communicating with other writers, people should be able to understand you and relate with you. Through impeccable communication skills, it becomes easier for one to get their team members meet their deadlines, eventually helping one reach his own target. 

4. The art of listening: This is a skill which is required by everyone. You need to be a good listener to reach somewhere in your life. For a medical writer, it is extremely important to develop some great listening skills so that he can take the project briefs clearly from the clients and make a contribution to team meetings and sessions, before proceeding further. The person speaking might use their own phonetics, jargon or other medical terminologies, so one needs to listen very keenly in order to avoid missing out on anything important. This would help you in writing down the details, questioning them and clarifying their answers. When you listen properly, it helps you to avoid jumping to conclusions and also restricts you from forming a prejudice. It helps you offer your own opinion as well and then draw conclusions and inferences. 

5. Stay open to feedback and criticism: Everyone likes being praised, but it takes real skill to be able to handle criticism and stay open to feedback. It becomes a very difficult task to work with healthcare experts and clients who might be excised from real-world patient lives. Putting forth new concepts and ideas in front of these reviewers for consumer health marketing/promotions or patient education can be challenging. It can invite a lot of criticism from them and as an efficient medical writer, you need to deal with the criticism of your drafts with patience. You should be able to support your concept, ideas, and drafts by making them understand why you went ahead with the specific approach or data. Sometimes it can also result in editing your drafts, letting go of your perspective and ideas and formulate new content explications. 

6. Critical thinking and data literacy: Developing a critical thinking and familiarity with data are two key components of medical writing. As a successful medical writer, you need to have these two qualities within you so that you know that what you are writing is valid and true. You will need to go through various sets of complex data and problems, and you should be able to understand it and simplify it for people to understand. 

To conclude, these are a few essential soft skills that are required by medical writers at all level to make a mark in the healthcare communications today. Though this is not a comprehensive list and the pharma and healthcare firms might focus on other qualities as well and would prefer one over the other. But by developing soft skills you will only complement your hard skills and your chances of succeeding in your career will multiply by many folds.

Though soft skills cannot be really taught, it is more of self-developmental thing, there are certain courses that help you build interpersonal skills and soft skills required for your work. You can get training for medical writing to be updated on recent industry trends and guidelines and improve professionally. Turacoz Skill Development Program offers you with six-month diploma course in medical writing, market research and pharmacovigilance. The candidates here not only learn the basics of medical writing and other industry details but also develop their interpersonal skills. We help them to transform into a successful professional and work on their personality development as well. We help them develop the required soft skills and other technical skills required to be a successful medical writer.

To know more about us and the courses we offer, write to us at trainings@turacozskilldevelopment.org. To register for the diploma course, click here.