5 ways to Enhance Your Soft Skills as a Remote Medical Writer

By Virginia Chachati MPharm

Soft skills, including communicating clearly and building relationships, are essential for a long career as a medical writer. Here are 5 ways to enhance your soft skills as a remote freelance medical writer, where in-person meetings are scarce, and first impressions can be make or break.

What are soft skills? 

Soft skills can be defined as the way you act with others and how you do things. Soft skills include communication, teamwork, creativity, problem-solving, leadership, learning a new skill quickly, and time management. You can think of soft skills as complementary to hard skills, where you need to know how to do something specific, such as speaking a language or using software.

1. Join an online community

Soft skills enhanced: communication, building relationships, empathy

Being part of a community means learning from one another as well as sharing your own knowledge. You meet new people who have different life experiences, and there is an opportunity to build business relationships and friendships. Knowing who to turn to when you have a question is an invaluable resource.

Level up: If you feel up for it, start your own community to enhance your leadership skills, ability to learn quickly, and problem-solving skills.

2. Comment and post online

Soft skills enhanced: communication, creativity, ability to learn quickly, critical thinking

Try commenting on other people’s posts online, such as on LinkedIn. You will learn how to compose an appropriate response and position yourself as a person who appreciates others’ efforts to share their knowledge or opinions. Contribute your thoughts, share a resource, or simply state that you learned something new.

Writing your own posts helps you learn how to communicate your ideas, and you can select pictures, videos or a document to support your post. This allows you to be creative, and teaches you how to engage an audience.

Level up: Take a short course on how to design images or create videos to accompany your posts.

3. Learn new things regularly

Soft skills enhanced: ability to learn quickly, adaptability, problem solving, independent initiative

Your brain is like a muscle and you need to exercise it by learning how to do new things regularly. This could be as simple as reading a book on a topic that you have never heard of or trying out a new piece of software just to see how it works.

By practising the discomfort of learning something new, you are preparing yourself for the next time you need to learn something new, and overcoming the fear of taking a first step into the unknown. This will speed up the learning process, and help you be seen as dependable.

Level up: Join a group class to learn something new together, this will enhance your teamwork and, potentially, leadership skills.

4. Take a course on public speaking

Soft skills enhanced: communication, thinking on the spot, delivering a message with intent

Working remotely as a medical writer means you often do not get to speak out loud. Learning how to think and speak on the spot will improve your confidence and show that you can eloquently piece your ideas together and present them in a concise, logical, and engaging way.

A course on public speaking will make pitching to clients or simply delivering an online presentation a lot easier, and your confidence will engage the audience.

Level up: Find an opportunity to present to a live audience. Take notes on what went well and what you could improve next time. 

5. Actively attend online events

Soft skills enhanced: communication, active listening, building relationships, willingness to learn, critical thinking

Practise active listening by taking notes during an online event or presentation, and think about questions you can ask the presenters. Make yourself open to connecting with other people that attend and discuss your thoughts with them. Events are prime networking opportunities to meet people who share the same interests.

Think critically by considering the completeness of presentations and any bias. Look up any references to see how they were used and develop your own opinions on topics that came up.

Level up: Ask to speak at an online event or create your own. This could be a simple live webinar with a short set of presentation slides. Watch a recording of the event to see how you performed.

Next steps

Soft skills are worth developing to help prepare you for your next project. It’s even better if you have a community to build your soft skills together. Good luck!

Author information

Virginia Chachati MPharm is a PIF TICK accredited clinical content creator, known as Pharmacist Virginia. She is a medical copywriter and content strategist specialising in YouTube, LinkedIn, and websites, including search engine optimisation (SEO). She founded Write Clinic - Medical Writing has a free LinkedIn medical writing community and creates resources to help medical writers, including the Write Clinic YouTube channel .