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23 Jun 2026 ● Louise Hoult, BA (Hons), DipHE RN

From The Bedside To Industry: What I Learned On Both Sides Of The Interview Table

Louise Hoult, BA (Hons), DipHE RN

About the author

Louise Hoult is a registered nurse, healthcare educator and founder of Elevate & Thrive. Following a successful clinical career, she progressed into leadership and commercial healthcare roles, including Head of Training and Development within the medical device sector.

Drawing on experience across nursing, education, sales training and healthcare industry partnerships, Louise now supports healthcare professionals and organisations through training, career development and commercial education programmes. Her work focuses on helping clinicians understand the opportunities available beyond traditional clinical settings while equipping healthcare organisations with the skills needed to succeed in today’s NHS landscape.

She is a passionate advocate for professional development, lifelong learning and creating alternative career pathways for healthcare professionals.

I trained as a nurse. I also spent years in the medical device sector, where part of my job was interviewing, hiring and coaching clinicians moving into commercial roles. So I have sat on both sides of the table — first as the nurse quietly wondering whether my clinical years would count for anything beyond the ward, and later as the person deciding whether a candidate had what a commercial team actually needed. From that vantage point, one thing became impossible to miss:

the nurses who struggled at interview were almost never short on ability. They were short on a way to translate the experience and skills they already had.

This is what I wish someone had told me sooner.

A profession quietly on the move

When I first left clinical practice, I assumed I was an outlier. I wasn’t. Recent headline workforce figures look healthy — the Nursing and Midwifery Council reported a record 853,707 nurses, midwives and nursing associates on its register in the year to March 2025 — but underneath that number, 28,789 professionals had left the register over the same period; around 3.5% of the total (Nursing and Midwifery Council, 2025).

The Royal College of Nursing’s analysis of UK-educated leavers in England found that the number leaving within five years of registering rose by 67% between 2021 and 2024, and within ten years by 43% (Royal College of Nursing, 2025). The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan, meanwhile, projects a shortfall of between 260,000 and 360,000 staff by 2036/37 and leans heavily on retention strategies to close it (NHS England, 2023; The King’s Fund, 2023).

Here is the part that mattered to me: leaving a clinical post is not the same as leaving healthcare. A great many of us move sideways, into commercial and educational roles — and the destination is bigger than most nurses realise. The wider UK life sciences sector employs more than 300,000 people and is worth over £100 billion (BioIndustry Association, 2025). Medical technology alone turns over around £34 billion and employs about 154,000 people across more than 4,000 businesses (Cpl Life Sciences, 2024).

The pharmaceutical industry directly employs more than 73,000 (Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, no date). And these are employers with a recognised shortage of exactly the skillset nurses carry. The demand is real: a 2024 Skills England report flagged commercialisation and translation among the sector’s skills gaps (BioIndustry Association, 2025) and clinical insight is part of what is in short supply.

Your clinical experience is the asset — I learned this the hard way

When I went for my first role in industry, I made the classic mistake. I treated my nursing years as the thing I was leaving behind, almost apologising for not having a ‘commercial’ CV. It took me far too long to see that my clinical experience was not a gap in my application — it was the strongest element of it.

Commercial healthcare teams, particularly in devices and clinical education, want clinicians precisely because they can speak credibly to other clinicians, understand governance and procurement, recognise where a product genuinely helps a patient and where it does not, and carry the trust of the professions they came from. The values the NHS drills into every nurse — compassion, accountability, patient focus — are not soft extras. They are so central to good healthcare that Health Education England built an entire values-based recruitment framework around them (Health Education England, 2016). Those same values are what industry struggles to hire for.

You are not starting from zero and asking to be let in. You are bringing a scarce form of credibility.

Why we undersell ourselves — I’ve watched it happen, and done it myself

Once I was the one interviewing, I saw the same patterns again and again — and recognised every one of them from my own early interviews. Four stand out:

  • We describe duties, not outcomes. “I ran the clinic” tells me what you were responsible for, not what changed because you were there.
  • We apologise for ‘no commercial experience’ instead of evidencing the transferable competence we already have in abundance.
  • We underplay achievement. Clinical culture rewards quiet modesty; a commercial interview rewards clear, evidenced ownership of results. The shift feels uncomfortable at first — do it anyway.
  • We speak in NHS shorthand. Acronyms and internal language a panel may not share can bury an otherwise excellent example.

How to translate — what I now coach people to do

  1. Convert clinical work into commercial language. The first thing I ask people to do is map what they did onto what the employer cares about - influence, stakeholder management, education, change, data, results. “Training the ward team” becomes “delivering education and driving adoption of a new protocol”. “Managing a caseload” becomes “prioritising under pressure across competing stakeholders”. The work is identical; the framing is what makes it legible to a commercial panel.
  2. Build evidenced examples with a recognised structure. Commercial and NHS interviews alike are usually competency-based: the panel wants evidence of past behaviour, not assertion. The STAR structure — Situation, Task, Action, Result — is the established way to make an example land (NHS England, no date). I tell people to prepare six to eight stories, each demonstrating a different competency (influencing, resilience, problem-solving, working to a target), and to quantify the result wherever they honestly can.
  3. Do your commercial homework. Understand the company’s products, the clinical pathway they sit in, who their customers are (clinicians, procurement, commissioners) and who their competitors are. You do not need a sales background to show commercial awareness; you need to show you understand how the business creates value and where a clinician fits within it. When I was hiring, that understanding stood out far more than polished sales patter.
  4. Answer the “why leave nursing?” question well. Frame the move as a step towards something, not an escape from something. As an interviewer, I was always wary of candidates who seemed to be running away; I invested in those moving with intent and a clear sense of where they added value.
  5. Bring proof. A concise portfolio: a pathway you improved, an audit you led, teaching you delivered, an outcome you can attach a number to, does more than any rehearsed answer. Evidence turns “I’m a good communicator” into something a panel can actually verify.

An honest word

I won’t pretend the move is all upside. Many commercial roles carry targets, travel and a different kind of pressure, and the first six months will be a steep learning curve while you absorb unfamiliar processes; mine certainly were! Going in clear-eyed makes for both a stronger interview and a better decision.

The clinical foundation that makes you valuable does not vanish when you leave the ward. It becomes the platform you build on; in my case, it was what let me go on to design induction and training for entire commercial teams.

In summary

The best professional decision I made was realising my clinical experience wasn’t behind me — it was the foundation everything else stood on.

The nurses I’ve seen make this move well are rarely those with the slickest commercial vocabulary. They are the ones who understand that their clinical experience is the asset, and who can say so clearly and with evidence.

If you’re a nurse weighing up a move into industry, that’s the shift to make before you ever walk into the room. Translate the experience you already have, and the interview becomes far less daunting than it first appears.

References

Registered Nurse

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