Five Essential Skills a Business Developer Can Learn From a Paramedic
Thinking of a radical career shift? Consider your skills as a language and do some translation work!
Back when I was working as a paramedic in Switzerland, I kept hearing the same complaint: once you have embraced this path, there is no way for you to change career. You are stuck in your ambulance until retirement day. I will not discuss here the pros and cons of choosing an emergency worker’s life. I have loved that job and I will always be a paramedic deep in my heart. My point is to challenge the self-limiting mindset that this constantly repeated discourse is generating and to show that the skills acquired in a specific field can successfully translate to a completely different domain. Most of the time, what lies behind the everyday tasks of rescue teams seems so obvious to them that they don’t even realise it actually consists of a set of capacities that are highly valued and sought after in other areas of expertise. Want to discover five essential skills a business developer can learn from a paramedic? Put on a pair of violet nitrile gloves and join the crew for a 12 hours shift!
Setting the scene
What is the job of a paramedic? First, to assess the situation, then to stabilise the patients and improve their condition, while at the same time heading towards the most appropriate hospital to complete the treatment.
What is the job of a business developer? First, to evaluate the current performance of the company, then to maintain and expand its relationships with the customers through adequates strategies in order to help it grow.
In both cases, it is all about establishing a sound basis that will allow improvement by using the right tools and connecting with the right people.
- Analytical skills
It is a snowy, icy, windy Saturday night around 2:30 am. You are called for a car accident on that famously treacherous crossroad. Once you get there, before making any further move, you need to fully understand what is going on around you: there is a van lying upside down in the middle of the intersection, a jeep collided with a car, people screaming, oil leaking from the vehicles and various kinds of debris scattered all over the place. In the blink of an eye, you have to identify potential immediate threats to the safety on scene, assess the general environment, estimate the number of victims, gauge how severely injured they might be, reflect on the necessity for additional resources such as helicopters or firefighters and imagine the best way to manage the influx of patients and other emergency responders. Having grasped all the relevant information in less than a minute, you now make decisions and take actions according to the best cost-benefit ratio and you enter into a process of constant reassessment and improvement in order to achieve the greatest outcome for the greatest number.
2. Organisational skills
To successfully manage all those elements while anticipating the different turns the situation might take, you definitely have to master the art of prioritising, coordinating and juggling with many balls at the same time.
3. Communication skills
The key to a good mission is crystal clear communication all the way through, from the call coming in from the dispatching centre to the written report you hand over to the hospital. During the intervention itself, your job is to ask questions without inducing the answer, listen carefully, analyse the information given and retain only what is relevant (when the chest pain actually appeared — not the whole story about that poor neighbour who caught a pneumonia last winter), give precise orders to your colleague regarding monitoring, drug administration and evacuation, and finally sum it up all in a neat and concise speech that you will deliver to the medical team waiting for you in the emergency ward at the hospital. And of course, write a report after the mission is done.
4. Negotiation skills
Just as firefighters spend a lot of time dealing with automatic fire alarms and bees swarm, so do paramedics with non-compliant and/or violent patients. While asking the police for a strong hand is always an option, it is usually one everyone tries to avoid unless personal safety is seriously at risk. I remember spending hours negotiating with all kinds of people who didn’t want to come with us, although they truly needed help. Those cases require extreme attention to every single word and move, as well as strong solidarity with your teammate. The old “bad guy / good guy” strategy is most of the time successful, but sometimes you have to put on your best lawyer suit to win the argument.
5. Creativity
Because most of the usual emergency procedures consist of intensively drilled gestures such as chest compressions in case of a cardiac arrest, paramedics — and here I mean women and men — are able to perform two things at the same time. This standardised way of working allows space for making good use of your imagination to solve a wide range of problems, from somehow basic to weirdly complex. How to enter into the bathroom when the victim lies unconscious on the floor, her body preventing the door from opening? What to put on a sprained ankle when you have run out of cold pouches on a busy summer day? (answer: open the freezer and grab a pack of green peas). Where to secure the end of the metallic stake that has pierced the abdomen of your patient so that it doesn’t fall on him when the firefighters cut it? And so on…
Dare to tell, dare to ask!
Even though not all paramedics would be good business developers and vice versa, the skills required by both professions are similar and can translate from one field of expertise to the other.
To the (Swiss) paramedics who dream of a new career, go and tell the people what your current job actually consists of and forget for a while the heroic and spicy stories you usually enjoy sharing.
To the business developers who want to brush up their skills in a new environment, go and ask to spend a few days in an ambulance company. Paramedics all over the world love to show what they do and recount their adventures.
To recruiters who receive applications from candidates who seem to have a completely irrelevant background, breathe deeply and take a closer look: you might discover that under a blood-stained paramedic uniform hides a perfectly ironed business developer suit.
