6 elements for an effective bio

There are few things that feel more cringe-inducing than having to write a bio.

Unfortunately, in MedComms, they are unavoidable.

I’m Eleanor Steele and I’m the MedComms Mentor, and today I want to help you write or update your bio without feeling like you might be a little bit sick in your mouth.

Freelancers need to have a bio to send to new agency clients to give a snapshot of their skills and experience. They’re different from a CV or a resumé, though there are obviously some areas of overlap.

Agency people need bios too. They’re an integral part of any pitch deck or proposal sent over to potential pharma clients to win new business.

This video includes information that could be used by anyone writing or updating a bio, but I’m focusing in on all of you lovely freelancers out there specifically because people working in an agency will probably have more existing resources to help them.

Agencies usually have a bio template for you to follow, and everyone else in the team will have a bio already, maybe even multiple different versions of bios that they’ve built up over the years.

If you are in an agency and someone has asked you to write a ‘quick bio’, don’t reinvent the wheel.

Ask for a template.

Ask for examples.

Ask what sort of experience you should highlight based on whether it’s a generic bio that’s just going to go in the file for the next time that you need to provide one, or whether it’s for a specific purpose, a particular client, on a particular drug, where you need to focus on certain things.

Us freelancers aren’t so lucky though – we don’t have somebody who is going to be able to give us those kind of structures to follow.

Now, if you are a freelancer who previously worked in an agency, maybe you were canny enough to save a copy of your agency bio that you can use to adapt when you need a new one in your new career as a freelancer.

If so, awesome job – you don’t have to start from scratch, but the tips that I’ll go through today will still be useful.

If you don’t have a bio in your back pocket, don’t worry.

In this video, I’m going to talk you through the six key elements that you should include in your bio and explore some useful questions that you can ask yourself to help identify the right things to highlight without feeling like you are going to die from embarrassment.

1. Overview of your career

The first element you need to think about is an overview of your career. How long have you been working in MedComms?

It’s a fairly crude metric, but saying that you’ve got 5 years’ experience, or 10 or even only 1 will help people understand what kind of level you are operating at. It isn’t compulsory to include it, but if you leave it out, you may just get people asking, and it’s probably going to be obvious from your CV anyway.

Now, obviously how long you’ve worked in MedComms doesn’t tell the full story. Some people will come in as a Medical Writer, find their happy place, and just stick at that level for years.

Other people might have the same length of experience under their belts, but have had a meteoric rise through the ranks.

And that brings me onto the specific roles that you’ve done.

I’m not suggesting that you recap every role that’s listed in your CV, but it might be worth mentioning your most senior position, and also how long you held that role before going freelance.

It might also be relevant to include whether you have always been on the medical writing side of things or whether you’ve had a more varied trajectory.

Have you done any hybrid roles?

Or maybe you started out as an editor before switching over to medical writing?

Did you try out a client services role in your youth?

Or maybe you had a secondment in a client team for six months?

These kinds of experiences are really good to highlight because they show you have a broader background than the average freelancer, and that might work to your advantage.

You should also mention if you’ve had any other roles that are relevant to your work as a freelance medical writer.

Did you start off client-side and then move over to MedComms?

Or have you worked in academic publishing?

Maybe you were previously a healthcare professional – that clinical experience is always worth a mention too.

And now let’s dig a bit deeper into your experience.

2. Lists of your experience

It is useful to capture an overview of all of your experience, so having a list of all the main things that you’ve worked on over your career. This includes the therapy areas, the clients, and the drugs, the project types, and the roles that you performed on those projects.

Now, most agencies have these kind of experience trackers so that it’s easy to see who might be the best person to assign to new accounts or who to call on if they need an expert in a particular therapy area or a project type to pull into a pitch.

I would recommend that all freelancers create something similar so that you can keep track of what you’ve done and don’t have to spend hours racking your brains if a potential client asks if you’ve ever worked on haemophilia or written a systematic review.

Most of this information would just be for you. It’s unlikely that you’d need to tell potential clients about specific pharma companies or drugs that you’ve worked on unless you need to check whether there’s a potential conflict of interest with current work. But you will need to keep track of what you’ve done so that you can pull the relevant information into your bio.

You can create this kind of list in whatever format works for you – Excel, a table in Word, maybe even a slide deck.

I happen to use Notion for mine, and I’ve actually created a template that you can use, and there’s a link to this in the video description.

I would recommend filling in this tracker and then setting a reminder to update it regularly, maybe monthly, maybe quarterly – whatever makes sense for the type of work that you are doing, and well, how good your memory is.

Keep these lists up to date as you gain experience to make updating your bio as easy and quick as possible.

Now the key pieces of information that you’ll need to pull from this tracker when you’re working on your bio are:

Which therapy area you have worked on?

Which project types you have worked on?

What roles that you performed on these projects?

So were you following someone else’s brief and writing the content, or did you develop the concept and then direct other people’s work?

Did you go on site for meetings?

Were you working directly with thought leaders or pharma clients?

Now you might not need to include this level of detail for every bio, but if you know that your client is interested in your support for a particular kind of work, it makes sense to emphasise the depth and breadth of experience that you have in that area.

But if you’re just writing a general bio rather than one in response to a specific request, it’s a good idea to group things together to make it as concise as possible.

For example, you just say, ‘rheumatology experience’ rather than listing out rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, etc, etc, individually, or you could say ‘extensive meetings experience’, instead of churning out every ad board, symposium and standalone that you’ve ever worked on.

But if you are writing a bio for a specific client, don’t just highlight your niche, super-relevant experience. You can also include a couple of general statements to show you have other experience and capabilities, and that actually brings me onto the next element that I suggest you should consider.

3. Insight into your professional interest

At this point, I think it’s a good idea to have a think about your professional interests. While it’s definitely a good idea to have a record of everything that you’ve ever worked on so that you can easily include it in your bio, that doesn’t mean you have to include things, even if they seem relevant.

When we work in an agency, we may not get that much control over what we work on. Maybe our line manager will consult us about which team we’re put on, and we might have the autonomy to turn down a project we really don’t want to do or to volunteer for something that sounds awesome. But generally in an agency team, we just pick up the work that needs to be done.

That’s true to a certain extent as a freelancer, but when you are writing a bio to use with potential new clients, you can highlight the types of projects or therapy areas that you want to focus on, and play down, or leave out the experiences that you don’t actually want to repeat.

Just because you’ve spent hundreds of hours on Veeva or Zinc doesn’t mean that you have to mention it if the thought of one more minute linking references makes you want to scream.

And if diabetes bores you to tears after seven years on the same account just leave it to the bottom of the list or don’t include it at all.

It’s one of the joys of being a freelancer. You can craft a career that works for you, playing to your strengths or maybe the strengths that you want to develop.

Maybe you’ve worked on Med Affairs accounts your whole career and have only written one publication, but really enjoyed that experience. Bringing your enthusiasm for publications projects to the fore will mean you are more likely to pick up that kind of work so that you can build your experience further and hone the skills you want to use and develop.

It’s also a good idea to think about how you can show that you will add value to standard projects. So that might be simple things like a really strong eye for detail, or maybe you’ve done some recent PowerPoint training, so you’d be an excellent choice for making a dull slide deck more visual. This kind of thing takes a little bit of thought and it has to be personal to you, but everyone has something unique that they can offer.

4. A suitable photo of yourself

It is also a good idea to include a photo. It’s not absolutely mandatory unless the client requests it, but it is the standard way that bios are formatted. You may have a professional photo from a previous job, but even a selfie can be used if it gives the image that you want to portray to potential clients.

A simple headshot is the best type of photo, generally with a fairly neutral background and without any other people or anything distracting in the frame. So make sure you don’t have a plant or a light fitting growing out of your head.

Maybe you already have a suitable photo as your LinkedIn profile picture, or is that also something that you may need to update now that you are doing your own business development?

I think most people do have this kind of neutral, professional photo on LinkedIn these days, but not everybody uses a photo. Now, I understand that there are good reasons why you might not want a photo of yourself in the public domain, but I would say that unless you’ve got a really strong reason not to, I would put a photo in your bio or on LinkedIn.

It helps people connect with you and see you as a real person, which is definitely useful for getting new clients and growing your business.

5. A clear and simple slide template

You can draft your bio in whatever format works for you, but I predict that at least 99% of the times that you are asked to provide a bio, it will be phrased something like, ‘Can you send me a slide with your bio on it?’

That’s just how MedComms works. We love PowerPoint!

When you are creating your bio slide, it doesn’t need to be on a special branded template unless that’s something that you need for other aspects of your freelancing. It just needs to be clear and simple. No intrusive swooshy bits, nicely contrasting colours to make everything really clear and accessible.

A layout that’s easy on the eye.

Something to pay attention to is the font. Make sure that you use a standard font to ensure that any formatting won’t change when it’s opened up on a client’s computer.

I’ve had numerous horrific experiences with slides that include a fancy font. They look beautiful when they’re done, but then look like a dog’s breakfast when they’re sent to someone else because the recipient doesn’t have the right font installed.

This is definitely not an occasion where you want to risk things going wonky, so just play it safe with a standard font.

You don’t have to play it completely safe with the next element, though.

6. Something personal…

What do you do outside of work? It’s a really good idea to include a tiny snippet right at the end of your bio about you as a person.

So when you’re not working, are you training for a triathlon, or knitting hats for your whole family or perfecting your cake decorating technique.

If you can include a personal detail or two, it’s so effective for bringing your bio to life, which can help you make connections with the people that you are hoping will become your clients.

You don’t have to give away anything too sensitive, and it’s probably best to avoid anything X-rated or that could be misinterpreted, but having a little taste of what makes you you, not just your professional persona, can go a really long way.

Download the summary

If you started watching this video thinking that writing your bio was going to be a massive cringe fest, hopefully you are feeling a bit more comfortable with the idea now. As a quick reminder, the six key elements that I think that you need to include are:

1. A brief overview of your career, focusing on your experiences in MedComms, but also mentioning anything else that’s relevant to your current work
2. A summary of your experience based on a tracker that you regularly update, so it’s not a massive pain when you need to create an updated bio in 10 seconds flat
3. Some insights into your professional interests so that you can focus your bio on the types of work you want to do
4. A suitable photo for yourself
5. A clear and simple slide template for the bio itself, including a standard font
6. And a little personal detail to bring the whole thing to life

If you use these six elements, you’ll have all the ingredients you need for a basic bio that you can use whenever you’re asked for one, but also be able to update and adapt this basic bio so that it’s tailored and relevant for the specific clients that you want to work with.

You can download a PDF summary of all of these microtips from a link in the video description below, to help you pull together and organise all the things you need.

And my next video will walk you through what you need to do to create your basic bio if you don’t have one already, and how you can quickly and easily update and adapt that bio for different formats and for different clients so that whenever anyone says, ‘Can you send over a quick bio?’ your response will be, ‘Sure, give me 10 minutes!’ rather than, ‘Oh God, do I have to?’

If you found this useful, I’d be really grateful if you could hit the like button and do let me know in the comments if you have any questions or any suggestions for topics for future videos. I’d love to hear from you!