The Visibility Gap: What MedTech Professionals Reveal About Their Own Market Position
Aggregate insights from the MedTech Market Positioning Scorecard — and what the data reveals about where MedTech careers quietly lose visibility.
The MedTech Market Positioning Scorecard has now been completed by a meaningful sample of MedTech professionals across Australia. The results are worth sharing — not as a ranking exercise, but because the pattern says something honest about where commercial professionals in this sector tend to be strong, and where they tend to have blind spots.
The issue is not that MedTech professionals lack capability. It is that their capability is often clearer internally than it is externally.
One of the more useful things about running a structured diagnostic over time is that patterns emerge that aren’t visible in individual conversations.
"The Market Position scorecard intro page, for context:”
What the data shows
Across the scorecard to date1,536 professionals visited the landing page. Of those, 79 started the diagnostic and 56 completed it in full.
That gives a 15% visit-to-start rate and a 71% completion rate once someone begins.
Across completed responses, the average overall positioning score sits at 60% ✔️.
That’s not a failing grade. It’s a visibility gap.
The more useful signal is the score tier breakdown:
27% — Developing Positioning
65% — Calibrating Market Value
8% — Market Aligned
That middle tier tells the real story.
Most respondents are not starting from scratch. They have credible experience, market exposure and professional substance. But their external positioning has not fully caught up with their capability.
In other words, they may be ready for broader opportunities, but not yet clearly visible to the market that would surface them.
The highest-scoring areas were the more internal or role-based dimensions:
Market Specification: 69%
Core Competency Mapping: 66%
Search Strategy & Execution: 65%
Market-Calibrated Assets: 64%
Commercial Alignment: 59%
These are signals of interest. MedTech professionals generally understand their market well, can identify where they fit, and have a grasp of their own capability and can articulate that.
The lower-scoring areas were more external:
Network Equity: 37%
Brand Authority: 41%
Strategic Growth Value: 47%
This is where the gap lives.
Most professionals know what they’re good at.
Far fewer have built the external signals that make them findable before a role is advertised, before a search mandate goes live, or before a shortlist has already started to take shape.
A few other patterns worth noting
Around two-thirds of respondents have no mentor or industry advisor actively guiding their career decisions. Not informally, not formally. Just navigating solo.
Nearly nine in ten have not published anything or contributed to professional conversations online in any meaningful way.
More than half have never sought feedback from a recruiter on how their profile or CV actually reads to someone assessing them against a live mandate.
And yet — the majority say they are ready for a leadership role right now.
There’s nothing contradictory about that.
Readiness and visibility are different things.
You can be genuinely ready for a broader mandate and still be effectively invisible to the search process that would surface you for it.
What this means in practice
In a retained search, the first stage isn’t reviewing applicants. It’s mapping the market — identifying who actually exists, who’s performing well in comparable roles, and who might be open to a conversation.
That process finds people through signals: their professional footprint, their network connections, who they’ve worked with, what they’ve contributed to.
Internal confidence doesn’t show up in that process. External visibility does.
The professionals who get approached for roles they didn’t apply for aren’t necessarily the best in the market. They’re the ones who made themselves findable before the question was even asked.
Where to start
If you haven’t yet completed the scorecard, it takes about 5 minutes and gives you a structured view across eight dimensions — not a generic career quiz, but a self-positioning diagnostic2 built around how retained search actually works.
No call required. No follow-up unless you want one.
👉 Market Position Scorecard - Benchmark my Market Position
Your result is yours to use. Review the lowest-scoring category, decide what needs attention, and apply the insight to your LinkedIn profile, CV, network strategy or next career conversation.
If there is a specific question you want to sense-check, you can message Richard. Availability for individual conversations is limited due to active search work, so this scorecard is designed to give you useful direction without needing a call.
If you want a deeper read on how the invisible market operates — and why most senior MedTech roles never reach a job board — the full briefing is here on Inside MedTech Hiring 👇.
— Richard
A note on the data
This is a live benchmark, not a finished research study. The scorecard remains open, and the data will continue to build over time.
It is deliberately self-directed: a free diagnostic to help MedTech professionals understand their own market position, not a push into a recruitment process. At an aggregate level, the responses also help identify where career visibility, market value and professional positioning tend to break down.
Your result is yours to use. Review the lowest-scoring category, decide what needs attention, and apply the insight to your LinkedIn profile, CV, network strategy or next career conversation. If there is a specific question you want to sense-check, you can message Richard.
Availability for individual conversations is limited due to active search work, so this scorecard is designed to give you useful direction without needing a call.