How To Relate Your Law School Acquired Skills To High-Value Careers

When you stop to think about it, a career is applying the skills and interests that a person has acquired over his or her lifetime to an economic endeavor. Your career identifies you. So, if it is going to define you, you should enjoy and be proud of what you do.

Identify high-value careers within high-value fields and relate your skills and interests to them. Most people spend more time planning a vacation than they do planning their career. Their careers just happen. That will not be the case with you. Spend some effort; this is your life.


Take your time and identify high-value fields and high-value careers. Now, select the ones that suit you and that you will enjoy. The number one trait to be successful is that you have to love your work. Successful people love their work. They enjoy doing what they do. So, do not be tempted into taking the first job to come along. Once you start down the wrong career path, changing direction is difficult. You develop expertise in the wrong area. Moreover, this development is at the expense of developing expertise in a high-value career.

There is a Swedish proverb, God gives every bird a worm, but He does not throw it into the nest. God has given you the skills, but it is now up to you to make them work for you.

Assuming that you have narrowed down a few interesting high-value career /high-value field options, however, you really need to know a little more. Where do you go to find out more? There are several avenues open to you. You can try as many as you feel are necessary to become comfortable with your career choices. Every one of the high-profile careers and rapid-growth business sectors has several trade magazines and newsletters. Most are available at the public library. Libraries are good places to find various career books, business publications, and trade journals. Read through the articles and see if they interest you. If the articles do not hold your interest, this may not be the career or business sector for you.

There are many periodicals available in the high-value fields and high-value careers. Be sure to read special issues that the trade publications publish. Read the year in review and forecast issues. You can get a cram course in the industry. Read companies you have targeted as being leading edge. Read about their competitors. It is a good idea to read basic business magazines and newspapers in addition to trade publications to get an overall feel for the business environment.

Organize yourself so that you can decide about your career quickly with the least amount of ambivalence or uncertainty. Do not worry if you find difficulty deciding among careers and fields. You can manage a job search in two or more avenues as long as you focus on a definite plan.

Read these publications creatively. Notice how people in the field and the career succeed. What characterizes them? Study the stories to see how you might add value. Work at this. The more you know about the company, the more you can relate your skills and background to a company's needs. You will be glad ten years from now that you took this time to do this.

If you are currently unemployed, be particularly careful when assessing new jobs or careers. Low self-esteem often causes you to look at less challenging careers more readily than you normally would. A common mistake is to decide based only on criterion: Will they hire me? Again, the day will come that you will be glad you had a plan of action and stuck with it.

Spend long hours in the library researching the computer business. Let the library become your office. Read everything you find worth reading. Annual reports, Standard & Poor's, trade magazines, anything and everything. You will know a lot, a whole lot of information that you did not know, vital information that will make the decision making process easier. You will know which companies who want to work for, what the companies are doing and what their needs are. So much so that when your friends will be busy sending resumes and introduction letters, you will send a resume that is laden with information that the company wants to hear and whilst others are still waiting for the call to come, you could probably beat them to it and only because you took the time to research and understand the job and the employers offering it.

Okay so what have you done so far? You have identified the high-value fields and careers. Then, you matched your skills and interests to target a career or careers within the field or fields. Now, you need to determine the leading edge companies within the high-value field. A leading edge company is a company that innovatively leads, or is close to leading, its high-value business sector.

Finding Leading Edge Companies:

Target a high-value career in a high-value field with a leading edge company. Remember no wind favors him who has no destined port. No one can guarantee the future. However, you can maximize your career opportunity by analyzing your potential employer within its industry. Understand its business posture and its future outlook. You can do all this by analyzing the same information that you looked at when you studied the high-profile fields. The articles will mention the prominent companies frequently. Some may be leading edge companies; others may be dinosaurs waiting to die.

How do you know which companies are leading edge companies? You can figure this out asking these questions:

• Which companies seem to lead the pack in innovation?
• Which companies are always in the news?
• Which companies have strong earnings?
• Which companies are expanding?
• Is the expansion into new geographic markets or into new product lines?
• How do the companies seem to differentiate themselves from the others in the field?

This is a critical step. Your future happiness and success are inseparable from the company's current strategy and competitive position in the marketplace and in the future trends of the industry. You may be a great employee, but if the company files for bankruptcy, your career hits the skids.

One Final Place to Look:

You have done all the research you can. However, you are still not sure. At this juncture, find-professionals in your area of interest and ask them about their jobs. People love to talk about themselves. They are great sources of unofficial information. You can realize a different perspective by speaking with people in these associations. You can attend luncheon or dinner meetings hosted by the professional organization and painlessly accomplish your mission. You can mingle at the cocktail hour and find out what the career or the business sector that interests you is really like. Some think that informational interviewing is the best way to assess careers. Asking the right people about careers in certain industries and the prominent companies in it is a good way to add to your knowledge base. More importantly, it avoids the common situation of many unhappy workers who are now saying-"If I had only known then, what I know now."

This is your new idea. Keep leveraging yourself-high-growth career, rapid-growth business sector, and a rapidly growing company within the sector. In so doing, your career will grow geometrically, as opposed to the average worker who, at best, is just staying even to where he or she was last year. This is why you aim your efforts at these targets.

Hitting the Target:

You are after a successful career, not a summer job. You must be willing to innovate and be creative. The old approaches simply are no longer effective. We have selected the targets. The next step is to build, guide, and land a powerful, job-seeking missile into the target. Then, as a result, you will get the opportunity to sell yourself at an interview with your target employer. So, let's get to it.