There’s a notion that medical doctors carry with them when they decide to venture outside of the clinical realm. It’s a belief that MBChB is a passport. The degree was so hard-won, and is so obviously demanding, that it must be worth something everywhere.
My first corporate job taught me this isn’t true, and the sooner one embraces it, the better the first couple of years out will go.
MBChB is not a general credential. It is a licence to take clinical responsibility for a human being. Don’t get me wrong - that is a rare and genuinely valuable thing, but it is valuable in exactly one lane - the clinical one. Your salary is coded for that lane. A medical officer grade one in the South African public service starts at just over a million rand all-inclusive.
That number is not a measure of how clever you are or how hard you worked. It is the price of a licensed person who can legally carry the risk.
Step out of the lane and the degree stops being the product. Nobody in a software company needs someone who can legally take responsibility for a patient. They need someone who can ship a thing or sell one. Your degree is evidence that you are capable and trainable, which is real - and which is also true of a lot of candidates who cost less and already know the job.
Some numbers, because the mood on LinkedIn is that health tech is desperate for doctors, and it isn’t.
Only about one in five digital health companies employ any clinical executive at all. The market for senior clinical roles is a small number of well-funded companies, not an industry-wide appetite. And the one real hiring time-series I could find runs the other way: US chief medical officer postings went from 767 in 2019, to over five thousand in 2021, and back down to 2,154 by 2024.
Then look at the roles doctors actually apply for. Medical science liaison is not a doctors-only job; about seven in ten MSLs globally hold a doctorate, and the rest of those holders are pharmacists and PhDs who often have the research CV you don’t. Every South African medical affairs advert I could find asked for two to five years of prior industry experience, and I couldn’t find one that welcomed a clinician straight out of practice.
Clinical data management, which sounds like the obvious landing spot, doesn’t ask for a medical degree at all - you’re over-qualified, and it isn’t an advantage.
And then the money. On the South African figures available, a non-doctor clinical-informatics role models out around five hundred and sixty thousand rand, against a medical officer scale that starts above a million. Only an executive informatics role gets you back to parity. Those informatics numbers are modelled rather than surveyed, so treat them as a direction - but the direction is clear.
None of this is an argument for staying clinical. I left. But I left understanding that I was starting again, and that the degree bought me an opportunity rather than a salary.
So if you’re planning this, plan for a repricing. Not a step sideways at the same number, but a step down into a job where your value has to be demonstrated in that company’s terms instead of assumed from your title.