Developing Your Veterinary Professional Identity
Who are you as a veterinary professional, and what do you value?
Your professional values and beliefs determine your professional identity. Understanding your professional identity is vital to promoting positive well-being in the veterinary profession. If you can understand your values and align them with the way you practice medicine, then you will likely experience more positive well-being. If you are placed in situations where you feel that you are going against your values, you may feel unsatisfied in your career.
Understanding your professional identity can help you realize what you want out of your veterinary career. It can also help in your decision-making skills in practice.
Common Veterinary Values
Researchers in the UK interviewed 20 veterinarians and veterinary nurses to evaluate career identity in the vet profession (Page-Jones & Abbey, 2015). Not surprisingly, they found that many vets started forming their vet identity from a young age and held their vet identity central to their overall identity.
Veterinary researchers found that the most common veterinary values were
Technical Competency
Learning
Teaching
Dedicated
Resilient
Ethical
Moral
Types of Veterinary Professional Identities
Another study in the UK explored new graduate veterinary professional identity to figure out which parts of were associated with positive and negative career satisfaction (Armitage-Chan & May, 2018). They performed a narrative inquiry with 12 recent grads in the UK. A narrative inquiry essentially evaluates your identity based on the stories that you tell.
Diagnosis-Focused Identity
For the first 2-3 months of practice, vets talked a lot about diagnosis and treatment in their stories. The most satisfying aspect of their job was to be able to obtain a definitive diagnosis and provide gold standard treatment. When they could do that, the vets were happy, but they were frustrated or disappointed when they couldn’t get a definitive diagnosis or if something happened that prevented them from providing gold standard treatment.
This diagnosis-focused identity is modeled in the academic setting of the veterinary teaching hospital. Veterinarians are taught gold standard medicine–which is great! If veterinarians could practice gold-standard medicine all the time, they would all likely be much happier. Yet, the reality is that, especially in general practice, you won’t always be able to practice gold standard medicine. Veterinary researchers suggest that if you are in general practice, and you attempt to model your professional identity on an academic clinician, you may be at a greater risk for job dissatisfaction.
Challenge-focused Identity
The other most common type of identity found in the veterinary profession is the challenge-focused identity. One of the main values of this identity is professional autonomy or being able to decide how you use your professional knowledge in different situations. Professional autonomy allows vets to adapt and individualize their decisions in practice based on what type of situation they are in.
Instead of only valuing getting to the definitive diagnosis, vets with a challenge-focused identity find success and satisfaction in overcoming challenges. Veterinarians in general practice are often faced with busy schedules or client financial limitations. If you are able to adopt a challenge-focused identity, you will be able to gain satisfaction from successfully navigating these challenges.
In general practice, you won’t always be able to obtain a definitive diagnosis and treatment. You have to find satisfaction in other ways, like being able to help an pet parent given limited resources or being happy that you were able to manage a crazy busy day on your own.
Developing Your Veterinary Professional Identity
Discovering your veterinary professional identity is crucial to finding happiness within the veterinary practice. There are several steps that you can take to develop and discover your veterinary professional identity.
1. Introspection
Introspection is the process of looking inwardly to discover your emotions, thoughts, and feelings. Introspection is important when developing your professional identity as it will allow you to identify your values and beliefs. One way to practice regular introspection is to journal. By writing in a daily journal about your thoughts and feelings, you can begin to identify your assumptions, values, and beliefs.
2. Observe
Another way to learn more about your professional identity is to objectively observe how you respond in various scenarios. Ask yourself what happened in the situation, and how did you respond. If you begin to observe your actions objectively, you can discover and determine how you will react in various situations. How you react is directly linked to your core values and beliefs.
3. Adapt
If you find yourself stuck in a rut in your veterinary career, allow yourself to adapt and grow. If you have discovered your values do not align with your current situation, allow yourself to adapt. Find more opportunities to align your actions with your values. For example, if you are a veterinarian that truly loves performing surgery, you might consider learning a new surgical procedure.
The veterinary career is an extremely adaptable career. There are numerous career opportunities available for veterinarians. Learn what truly makes you happy as a veterinarian and pursue those opportunities.
Final Thoughts
It is important when reviewing different types of professional identities to look inwardly to see which one resonates most with you. It is helpful to be aware of the things that we value most in practice.
By being aware of what it is that you truly value, you can try and find more opportunities to act in line with your values. This will lead to more positive well-being in your veterinary career.
References
Armitage-Chan, E., & May, S. A. (2018). Identity, environment and mental wellbeing in the veterinary profession. Veterinary Record, 183(68), 1-7.
Page-Jones, S., & Abbey, G. (2015). Career identity in the veterinary profession. Veterinary Record, 176 (17), 433.In gener
