Why I built it
Hey, it’s Dev, you may know me as Doctor Devify online! I’m an internal medicine resident doctor in the NHS. When I was exploring specialties, every specialty’s application has its own page, often on its own website, and even where they share one, like higher specialty recruitment for medicine, it takes a lot of clicking to get from one specialty to the next. It was genuinely so confusing to find the details. Plus checking them one by one took me ages. The competition ratios were somewhere else again, and the training pathways were even harder to find. Funnily enough, my videos explaining them got hundreds of thousands of views from people who couldn’t find them anywhere.
Moreover, the GMC survey has great data on what doctors rate, but it’s buried in a heavy table that takes ages to load, so I’ve condensed it into an easy interactive view, alongside anonymous reviews from doctors and video tips from doctors who’ve been through it. Literally Spec Select has it all in one place.
Doctor Devify
Spec Select is part of the Doctor Devify suite. I started Doctor Devify in 2023 to put NHS policy, workforce reform and system change into plain language for the people they land on. It has taken me from the ward round to national government campaigns and to 10 Downing Street, and it now includes the Doctor Devify Hub, resources for doctors at every stage. More of that story is on doctordevify.com.
The name and the mark
Spec Select was named because the first thing you do on arrival is choose a specialty. It is the choice every doctor makes at some point, and the one with the most pages to read. Everything about it is then laid out for you: the whole road in one place.
The mark is a compass of tiles: eight round a dial, one lit, the needle pointing straight at it. Every tile is a way your training could go, and the lit one is the one you chose. The compass beside each page keeps the same bearing while you read.