Personal Websites to Boost Your Career

Why have a personal brand and website?

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Having worked with the expert team at Dental Focus for many years, there is no question that dental practices benefit from having a good looking, functional and easy to use website. Whether their focus is on NHS Dentistry or they operate as a Specialist Referral Practice it is a fundamental requirement of modern business.

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When Krishan Joshi – CEO of Dental Focus - first spoke to me about the idea of personal brands and websites, it took me a little while to digest the concept properly. After all, as a specialist recruiter in dentistry, we rely heavily on a written CV, career profiles on Linkedin and general searches on social media activity (seeing what some people choose to get up to in their own time, often paints a different picture to someone’s professional CV). So why the need for a personal brand?

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Few professions are truly as much about the interpersonal relationship as the skills of the individual. Your Personal Trainer, Financial Advisor and your Dentist are all chosen on ability as well as personality (you’re hardly going to trust your pensions and investments to someone you don’t like and you’re certainly not going back to a dentist you don’t get on with).

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So creating your own personal brand and website gives you a brilliant opportunity to show off your clinical capabilities and results as well as your ethics and personality.

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It offers prospective employers and patients an insight in to your clinical skills as well as you as a person, starting to build those relationships with you as an individual before the patient is in the chair. Patients don’t buy from the dental practice after all, they buy advice and treatments from their dentist!

Being able to show your patients a portfolio of work is a fantastic tool to use in explaining the results that can be achieved with some treatments. A picture paints a thousand words etc.

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While the UK is suffering a significant skills shortage and a lack of dentists, I still talk to dentists regularly wanting to take that step in to private dentistry but wondering how they can show off their talent to prospective employers. A personal brand and regularly updated portfolio, would certainly go some way to making and impression.

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While some might think that practice principals would have reservations about their dentists having their own branded website, if it increases the take up of treatment plans and grows practice revenues, who is likely to argue with the logic? With the extra scrutiny from HMRC on self employed contracts, demonstrating a personalised brand which creates revenue may well have some further hidden benefits if HMRC come calling.