Analyzing Career Skills

Once a law student has accepted the notion that law is not a career, but rather that there are many different careers in law, it is a short step to the conclusion that choices must be made during law school regarding options available to graduates. One cannot simply wait for the right thing to come along, or postpone until after graduation critical career decisions.




The need to make career choices implies a correlative need to assess one's skills. Many law students are surprised even dismayed to learn that they must undertake this skills assessment. Did they not, after all, go through the very same thing when they decided to go to law school? Is it not now the most important job to find a job? Does a busy law student have time to worry about playing silly psychological games? Can one actually plan a career?

Click Here to Find Law Student Jobs on LawCrossing

There is a natural impulse to shortcut the process of making career choices, not only because it is uncomfortable to ask hard questions about life choices, but also because most law students do not understand how to manage effectively the process by which such choices are made. Just because one made a career choice in deciding to come to law school does not mean that one will not make other choices during law school, or after graduation for that matter.

Another problem many law students face in making career choices is the role that subjectivity, non-rationality, and personal feelings play in the process. The law school teaches students that the rule of reason is paramount, that every decision can and should be made rationally.

The law student who deigns to bring personal feelings and subjective judgments to analyses of hypothetical cases is inevitably portrayed as weak-minded by professors. Eventually, most law students learn to sound as if they can analyze questions in a coldly rational way, untainted by emotion. Some even believe this. Unfortunately, it is impossible to divorce personal feelings from career choices, and it is unwise to try because feelings are an important dimension in the process of making career decisions.

While the analytical skills developed during law school clearly should be viewed as assets in choosing a career, the individual must maintain a clear perspective on the role of the rule of reason. When hard facts seem to fly in the face of gut feelings, it is sometimes best to follow one's feelings. An offer that looks good on paper may be less attractive where subjective feelings point to deep-seated doubts about one's long-term satisfaction while working in the environment being considered.

You must know the techniques to sort out feelings and attitudes, and to get a handle on such abstract concepts you may have to apply the steel-trap logic that law school has inculcated to what could otherwise become a guessing game or a high-stakes crap shoot.

Career Theory

An understanding of some of the underpinnings of career theory may be useful. Although there are many books on career planning, the basic theory is probably best set forth by John Holland in Making Vocational Choices.

Holland argues that individuals tend to like activities in which they succeed, and that they will succeed in the future in activities utilizing the same skills or activities that have helped them to succeed in the past. It follows, according to Holland, that job dissatisfaction, or "dissonance" as he calls it, is related to the lack of skills necessary to perform work successfully. When we are frustrated in this way, there are three possible responses: we change ourselves (the skills we possess), we change the environment (the skills we utilize), or we leave the frustrating environment.

It is therefore essential that each individual assess his or her skills, not just in terms of specific jobs, but also in transferable terms that can be understood in a wide variety of endeavors. For example, a preacher, a politician, a trial lawyer, and an actress may all possess the oral skills of speaking and persuading.

An analogy may be helpful in applying these principles to law careers. Students sometimes believe, or are led to believe, that job opportunities are like a ladder, with practice in a large firm as the top rung, based on some vague notion of prestige, and employment in a non legal job as the bottom rung, only slightly more desirable than standing in a breadline or begging on a street corner.

In fact, Holland and most career theorists suggest that the ladder should be turned on its side so that various jobs are perceived as options. Instead of reaching for the top rung and then falling down the ladder until it is possible to grab a rung and hold on, one should view the entire ladder of possibilities and find the right place among them.

The important idea in the latter approach is this: What is right for one person is not necessarily right for someone else. "What is right" is partially determined by correlating the skills which a job requires and the skills an individual possesses. The closer the match between these two, the greater is the likelihood of finding satisfaction, as well as long-term success, in one's career. Job dissatisfaction may be partly a natural product of the transition from school to the working world, and endemic to contemporary civilization. The frustrations of living and working in the last decade of the 20th century would be similar in many other career fields.

Some of the dissatisfaction, however, may be a product of certain aspects of the practice of law. Furthermore, different kinds of practice have different sources of dissatisfaction as well as different levels of overall satisfaction. The goal of the career choice process is to identify potential frustrations and problems and to avoid them by making sound choices based on the alternatives available.

Making good career choices can affect long-term career satisfaction, but there are some pragmatic considerations as well. One's resume, interviewing style, and cover letters will be more powerful if they are based upon and reflect skills that have been identified through the career choice process. One's ability to recognize the right job when it comes along is enhanced also by an understanding of these skills.

Adele Scheele in her book Skills for Success concludes that the frequently cited reason given by successful people for their success being in the right place at the right time is not so much a product of good fortune as it is a specific ability to identify the right opportunity. This ability is based upon a number of skills, including the skill of knowing what transferable career skills the person can bring
to a given job.

To use another analogy, it is somewhat like entering the New-York City subway system without knowledge as to which train to catch. Someone could stand on the platform or ride for hours without reaching the intended destination.

Too many people approach career decisions as victims. They take the first train that comes along and go wherever it leads them. If they would only realize that they are in control of their destinies, they could find the right train the first time, and avoid much frustration.

Taking the time now to ask and answer questions about job skills and career goals can prevent hours of frustration during the job search, and perhaps years of unhappiness later in life. Too often, busy law students want to skip this part of the process, and get on to serious job hunting. But you are unlikely to bag the job you want if you cannot recognize an opportunity when it comes along.

The exercises presented here are designed particularly for law students, and are modifications of similar exercises that may be found in many contemporary career planning manuals. They are intentionally simple in recognition of the time limitations many law students face.

Those who wish to pursue this self-evaluation in greater depth may obtain one of other commercial books available. Perhaps the most popular of these is Richard Bolles' What Color Is Your Parachute? It takes its readers through a series of exercises aimed at finding the ideal job.

Its drawback is that in his exuberance, Bolles seems to suggest that if one simply follows the formula, the right job can be found. The failure to achieve that goal may be seen as the fault of the individual for not carrying out Bolles's plan as a true believer would. Also, since the manual is aimed at a general audience, law students will find some parts less helpful than others. Bolles's smaller book, The Quick Job-Hunting Map, may be a more useful guide to the skills analysis exercises, but it lacks any explanation of the underlying theory.

Another manual, The Complete Job Search Handbook, by Howard Figler, was written in response to the "true believer" approach of Parachute. Figler's book contains 20 chapters on 20 different job search skills with exercises for each. Although it also was not aimed specifically at law students, many have found it to be useful.

Other career planning manuals deal in great depth with the related but distinct issue of values clarification, another factor ultimately reflected in career choices. Values clarification is not treated in depth here. Those, however, who are plagued by questions such as, "How do I feel about prosecuting people and sending them to jail?" or "Could I represent a client with whom I am personally in disagreement politically?" may find values
exploration useful.

Click Here to Find Summer Associate Jobs on LawCrossing

Put Your Degree to Work, by Marcia Fox, is a hard-nosed pragmatic, although not widely recognized, tome on career and job research techniques for professional level individuals. Finally, Lawyers in Transition by Mark Byers, Don Samuelson, and Gordon Williamson represents a serious effort to apply sound career skills analysis to the legal environment. Although written for practicing lawyers, law students will find the chapters dealing with career planning to be particularly helpful.

Another recent development has been the use of personal inventories (e.g.—Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) to test how well an employee will fit into a given work environment. These tests have the advantage of a scientific method of development and validation, and they can provide valuable insights about the individuals tested. An increasing number of career counselors and legal employers are using personality tests such as the MBTI in the career planning and placement process.

A danger exists that such instruments will be misused by poorly trained administrators or by interpretations that suggest, "If your type is X, you must become a Y." The flaw in the logic is that not only X's may become Y's, and certainly not all X's must become Y's. The tests merely show a correlation between X's and those who have in the past become Y's.

For example, we often picture litigators as erudite, aggressive, and self confident. Although many litigators fit this mold, many trial attorneys do not. It would be unfortunate if they had chosen to avoid the courtroom because they did not fit the profile on some test.

Like any other analysis, the results of these tests can help you to find areas of practice that you may enjoy, but they cannot make your decisions for you. There may be other reasons leading you to different choices.

Exercises in Skills Analysis

The information you distill from the following exercises can be equally helpful to you analyzing your career skills. To complete the exercises, you need only have plenty of paper, a pencil (to erase), and a block of several uninterrupted hours in a place that permits thinking. Before getting into the exercises, however, there are several caveats:

1. Tell the truth. No one else needs to see this, so there is no reason to lie. Absolute, total honesty is the only way to do the exercises. Anything else will taint the results.
    
2. Spend the time to do it right. A block of several hours is necessary to work through the exercises. The exact time will vary from individual to individual, but there is a limit below which the results will have diminishing usefulness.
    
3. The career choice process is ongoing. This activity is not something to be done once and put aside forever. The career choice process continues throughout life. It may not be necessary to reconsider the results as the job search progresses. But it may be advantageous to rethink the questions asked here from time to time during your career, particularly at points of choice, transition, or frustration that inevitably will occur.
    
4. Pre-law career planning is not enough. The law school class room experience, clerking, and other extracurricular activities, and learning to "think like a lawyer" make it necessary to continue career planning already done, using both the insights gained earlier in the process and those later discovered. By the same token, it is impossible in one sense to know if a job is satisfying until it has been tried. It is not uncommon for a law student to believe that a certain choice, such as litigation, may be ideal, only to find that as a lawyer he or she hates the work. There are inevitably elements of any work that must be experienced to be understood. This means that career planning cannot end with finding a job or graduation from law school. It is a lifelong activity.
    
5. The career choice process is not the same as career planning. The term planning seems to suggest that there is a formula that will get you from here to goal X by following steps 1, 2, and 3. Things seldom happen according to plan, and many well-intentioned career planners become frustrated with the unplanned, and lose confidence in the career choice process. It is more like following a path through the forest, making choices at various forks using the best information available at the time with only a compass as a general guide for direction, as opposed to following a map driving the Interstate from New York to Chicago.
    
6. Do not procrastinate. Because making career choices means facing personal limitations, fears, and skeletons in the closet (both real and imagined), it is a frightening and anxiety-producing process. Too many law students cope with this anxiety by ignoring the problem. This procrastination has the unfortunate result of foreclosing many opportunities as time passes. The individual who starts the process during the first or second year of law school has a greater range of choices than one who begins after completion of the bar exam.
    
7. Finally, more questions may be raised than answered. Do not be discouraged if the result of completing these exercises is a sense of confusion. The issues are seldom black and white. This tension is healthy, and is indicative of awareness. Someone who is absolutely sure of his or her career choices may be someone who has not given them much thought. Anyone recalling the first year of law school knows that when you are sure you know all the answers, you really do not understand; only when you feel confused are you beginning to get close to the answers.

The skills analysis exercises that follow are intended to make you think, dream, and dredge up forgotten experiences. They can be an adventure or a chore. They can be as enlightening as you allow them to be.

Most of us have little experience at identifying skills. Because we seldom identify skills, we cannot articulate them when we need to in the job search process, much less in these exercises. This stumbling block is the single biggest impediment most law students have to effective job hunting.

It can now be revealed: Skills are things one can do; they are actions. Doing is expressed in the English language through transitive or action verbs, such as analyze, propose, organize, and direct. Thus, articulating skills requires no more than being able to describe actions using the full richness of the English language.

For example, someone who has participated in a moot court competition may have developed the following skills: speaking, persuading, organizing, researching, responding, and listening. By analyzing an activity in detail it is possible to break it down into component skills.

Frequently, it is difficult for law students to make the shift from describing job-specific skills to describing more general job-transferable skills. In other words, when completing these exercises you will want to take skill descriptions from specific activities and describe them in terms that could be applied to other activities. Furthermore, when applying for a specific job you will want to take these general terms and describe them in the language of the job.

In the previous example, a moot court participant may be able to identify an array of oral skills. As stated before, however, those same skills may be useful not only in work as a litigator, but also as a minister, politician, salesperson, or actor. In searching for a job, you may not have experience as an associate in a law firm but you may be able to demonstrate that you have done the things that associates do: speaking, persuading, organizing, researching, responding, and listening.

It may be useful to use a thesaurus to facilitate word choice as an aid during the exercises as well as throughout the job search.

Exercise 1: The Party--This exercise is in Richard Bolles's Quick Job Hunting Map and is intended to provide a rough sense of skills orientation by broad skill groups. Refer to the book to do the exercise.

Exercise 2: Accomplishments --Mentally review your life history from your earliest memories to the present. Then on 10 sheets of paper write your 10 greatest successes or achievements. It is not necessary to limit these activities to school, or jobs, or any other specific endeavor.

After listing the 10, fill out your listings by describing what you did and why you were successful. Then for each entry make a list of verbs describing the skills you used or developed. When you have a preliminary list of verbs, attempt to break those described into finer terms by asking what other skills were required to perform the listed skills. Save your lists.

Exercise 3: Law School Classes --On three sheets of paper, list your three favorite law school classes or those where you did your best work. (First year students can go back to undergraduate and graduate school.) As before, describe what you did in those classes and why you did well.

Then make a list of skills you used or developed in these classes. Break down the skills into sub skills if you can. Again, save the list.

Exercise 4: Law Work --Think back to your law-related work experiences. Note the use of the word experiences, which is not limited to jobs or to work during law school. List three different experiences on separate sheets of paper. If there are more than three, choose those in which you felt most successful. Then describe what you did.

In the case of a job or activity that involved regular hours, you may find it productive to summarize your activities for a certain period, say one week, to get a handle on what you did. Next, repeat the steps followed in Exercises 2 and 3 to produce a list of skills.

Exercise 5: Fantasy --Close your eyes and imagine what work you would be doing in five years if all your dreams came true, good fortune was always with you, and you had unlimited options. After having this fantasy, describe it on paper. Remember: You will probably only be able to record a fraction of what goes through your mind, so be selective.

Instead of looking back, look forward, and describe what you will need to do to be successful in this fantasy. Then make a list of skills you will need to use or develop in this work.
When you have completed this exercise, repeat it for 10 and then 20 years. Keep in mind that this is a fantasy, not a career goal, so do not get hung up on details.

Exercise 6: Strengths--In addition to skills that communicate what you can do, you have a number of strengths that describe what you are. If skills can be characterized as action verbs (i.e., I can_), strengths can be communicated as adjectives (i.e., I am). Just as you need to be able to tell employers about your skills, you need to be able to explain what your strengths are.

Some of us may remember the words of our mothers, "Don't toot your own horn." When it comes to jobs, you should forget what your mother said. This is the time to talk about your skills and your strengths. Professor Peter Kutulakis of Dickinson Law School has developed an Inventory of Strengths for Law Students which we refer to as the Dickinson Model. Using the Dickinson Inventory, you can assess your strengths quickly and easily. Take a few minutes to complete the inventory now. Keep these results separate from the results of the skills exercises above.

Exercise 7: Work Values --Another area that all career planners should explore is work values. These are subjective attitudes you hold concerning work generally that will affect your perceptions of any job you take. They reflect how you feel about yourself, your colleagues, and your work environment. Sometimes people who are good at what they do hate their work. If we looked at skills alone, this would not make sense, because we predict that someone who has the skills to do the job will be successful at the job, and if she is successful she will be satisfied. But if the work does not satisfy her work values, then she will not be happy even though she is competent to handle the work.

Because work values go directly to how you feel about your job, you should try to identify them. The following exercise, also developed by Professor Kutulakis for the Dickinson Model, is designed to help you recognize these important work values.

If you can identify values that are important to you, you should be able to look for a work environment that will support those values. Remember: no job is perfect, and sometimes it takes time to establish a supportive atmosphere in a work setting. Many elements of the environment will remain hidden from you until after you go to work because they are difficult to assess during the interview process. Yet if you have an idea about what values are important to you, and look for clues as you interview, you can maximize your chances of making a sound choice in the end.

Pulling It All Together

At this point you should have the results of the Party Exercise. To sort this out, list all the skills you have identified on all the other sheets on one sheet of paper. It is very likely that some skills will appear several times on the list, having come up in more than one exercise.

Next, rework your list by ranking the skills on the basis of the number of times each appears. Then place your ranked skills in one of the six major skill groups described in Exercise 1. This winnowing process is designed to help you focus on the specific skills and skill groups you have developed in your life. This information will be invaluable to you at every stage of the career planning and job search process.

Finally, in order to summarize the results of these activities, you may want to record your findings. This handy sheet will give you a thumbnail sketch of what assets you will bring to your work, and what assets you have to sell.

Refer to Bolles’ book and look at the Party scenario after doing the exercise and take look at your results from that exercise. Are the emphases in your skills similar to the preliminary preferences? If not, why not?

Are you surprised or not at the results? Do your skills correlate with your preconceived notions of your strengths and abilities? If not, what accounts for the differences? Are there skills that you feel need to be developed to a greater degree in the future? Which ones? Will your resume look different as a result of this experience? Will your career plans or job search take a turn?

Most law students find that their perspective on who they are and where they are going shifts—for some slightly, for others radically as a result of skills analysis. There are many so-called expert psychologists and career counselors—who can give and interpret career and vocational interest or aptitude tests. They may be able to help, but they can cost money. Many students can gain sufficient insights for their purposes through this process of regimented self-discovery just described. Friends, family, and co-workers will all be ready to tell you what you can and ought to do with your talents. Their impressions, while worth noting, do not compare to your own assessment of what you can do.

For many law students, the most difficult part of the entire process is identifying their skills. While people in general have little experience in skills analysis, law students probably have less. If their pre-legal education did not lead them away from subjective inner directed methods of solving problems, law school undoubtedly did.

Despite the fact that skills analysis may make some students uncomfortable, it is not a mystical process which can only be understood by an elect few. Remember these concepts integral to an individual understanding of his or her skills:

• Law students possess both the innate intelligence and the training to think rationally about employment.
   
• You alone have total responsibility for your life and its direction.
   
• You have to make choices. When the road forks, you have to take one path or the other. Whenever you make a choice, you open up some options and foreclose others; you gain something and you lose something. Know how you make decisions.
   
• Act at a time when you have the greatest control over the outcome of your decisions.
   
• Not only should you act to minimize the risk, but you should know what kinds of risks you are willing to take in the job search.
   
• You possess an array of skills which are transferable from one job or career to another. Too often, we think of skills in the vocabulary of one field and fail to see that the same skill might be transferred to a different area.

Throughout the process of considering broad career fields as well as specific jobs, it will be important to compare the skills required by the job with the skills you possess. At this point having gone through these self-assessment exercises defining the skills required by the job may still present a formidable problem while defining the skills you have should not.

Click Here to View the 2015 LawCrossing Salary Survey of Lawyer Salaries in the Best Law Firms