Ready for MUS?

conversation about your development, your tasks, and your well-being at work. It is therefore important that you prepare to be in the best possible position in relation to your needs and wishes. So that MUS is not experienced as a waste of time. Use your MUS for a review and feedback in order to be able to plan your future tasks and development opportunities.

Prepare your MUS
It is good to know your own values and your motivation before you start preparing for your MUS. Possibly use a value exercise, as described here, or think about what motivates you and what gives you job satisfaction. You are welcome to be very specific about which tasks you do and which areas of responsibility you have, and how you feel comfortable with them. For example, you can imagine that you have to describe your working day and primary tasks to a new colleague.

You can also ask yourself these five additional questions:

  1. How do I want my working life and career to look like?
  2. What will it take for me to achieve my goals?
  3. Which skills do I need to achieve my goals?
  4. How do I best develop the skills I have?
  5. How do I acquire new skills?


Basically, it is all about you, but you may also want to consider what it means from an organisational perspective. It may be that you dream of developing a new competence that plays together with the company's strategy or can contribute to the department achieving a common goal. 

When you prepare for MUS, it is also important that you put into words your job content and your qualifications, as well as the skills you want to achieve. A schedule is often included when you are invited to MUS. The form is good both as preparation and because it ensures a structure for the conversation with different points and questions, so that you get all the way around. It can be questions like:

  • How do you rate your well-being?
  • What is needed for you to feel good at your job?
  • What particularly motivates you about your work?
  • How do you contribute to our goals?
  • How do you feel about your work tasks?
  • Are there tasks you would like more of?
  • Are there tasks that are particularly challenging or that you would like to do less of?
  • How does your collaboration with others work? (give examples)
  • Do you have skills that need to be strengthened or developed?
  • What does your future look like, what are your wishes and ambitions?


In addition to filling in the form and thinking about your working life, you must also consider what you would like to get out of the interview. What exactly should your outcome be? Or what would you like to achieve for your future career? It is not always a question of wanting to move on to the next job or get a lot of further training. A development can also be getting a new area of responsibility or participating in a project where you have to contribute your specialist knowledge. For some, the purpose may be to find peace or create a work-life balance. The point is to have clear goals made for what needs to happen in the future.

Document the agreements
Make sure you formulate clear agreements for your development. If you write a report, it must therefore be fair and summarize the agreements you have made. This could be, for example, new tasks or competence development in the coming year. In many places, you write down the agreement in a development plan. It can be a fixed schedule that you use at work, but it can also just be a few lines in an email to your manager.

When writing down your goals, try to be as specific as possible. If it is, for example, a wish for a course, find the course and note the dates and what is needed for you to be successful with the course. That way, it can be easier to follow up later.

Example:

Goal Success criteria Deadline
Participate in the course "Pharmacovigilance - an introduction" and complete internal training PV-002 Better understanding of Pharmacovigilance Q4 – completed course
Q2 – trained in handling and reporting side effects

 
Handling of reports for XXX All reports are received and handled within five days Ongoing follow-up on status meetings
Personal planning Become more realistic about meeting deadlines Fixed item on the 1:1 agenda


Follow up
Use your MUS and development plan to hold your manager and workplace to what you have agreed. This ensures both your professional and personal development as well as your job satisfaction. You can hang parts of it on your notice board or make it part of the agenda when you have ongoing conversations with your manager. That way, you have an overview of progress and can keep yourself on track with your goals.

It can also happen that the plan changes. We can't predict everything, and things can happen in both your work and personal life that make you have to focus on something else. Be open to the fact that this can happen and have a talk with your manager about what you can do. Should the plan be revised or postponed? It might be nice that you talk about it on an ongoing basis, so you don't sit at your next MUS and get surprised.

So, keep a close eye on your development and how you contribute to the department's goals, so that during the year you make sure that you fulfil what you have agreed on. In this way, you can work on making your working life fit together, so that both your motivation and well-being are at their best.

Need help?
It can be difficult to get started on your own, so you are welcome to book us for a career interview, where we explore your development potential and talk about how you can approach it for your next MUS.

Contact the career guidance in Pharmadanmark.
Write to Karriere@pharmadanmark.dk