Career Planning: How to Search for a Satisfying Position

If you are presently dissatisfied with your position or, as the winter of your third year begins if you are a law student, you should start the search for your ideal position.

To many law students, this search means submitting a resume to the placement office and waiting for an on-campus interview or mailing the resume to those employers who send job notices to the law school. By now, however, you should realize that such typical placement procedures are not likely to result in your finding the position you want for several reasons.

The first reason is that those law firms that interview consist of a very small segment of the legal profession and only by a random act of coincidence will any one of them have a position consistent with your personal and professional goals. Using the on-campus interviewing program (OCI) and responding to ads constantly pits you against hundreds of qualified people for jobs. If there are, say, 200 resumes submitted for an opening, 190 of them will be eliminated right off the bat. For most job seekers, this leads to much soul-searching about why they were not considered qualified and may lead to a lack of self-confidence or panic that they will not get a job upon graduation.

The second reason traditional placement activities are not likely to help you find a satisfying position is that very few openings are ever advertised in writing. Career planners may differ on the percentages, but all agree that only a small percentage of all openings are going to be read about. Openings never appear in writing perhaps due to the lack of staff needed to distribute notices and to process hundreds of resumes or due to the costs involved in advertising.

Thirdly, it cannot be overemphasized that most jobs in any field are publicized when the position is available, not months or years ahead of time. Traditional placement activities automatically limit the search to the few employers who can predict what their needs will be nine or ten months down the road. Few employers operate that way.

In other words, the most satisfying position for you may not be advertised until after you graduate or it may not be advertised at all.

Once you understand this, you must realize that you need to learn an approach which will help you, both before and after graduation, to find these openings that few are aware of. Career planning must precede the search process: you have to know what you are looking for if you expect to find it.

Since your primary objective is workplace satisfaction, you have already identified your personal and professional goals and, hopefully, used summertime or part- time work experiences as a way to find out more about a particular field. By ranking your priorities, you have a good idea of what type of law interests you, the employment setting you think you would enjoy, where you would like to work, the salary range you are willing to accept, and so forth.

You know from your research that there are many opportunities for you in your chosen field. With the conviction that comes from knowing you truly want the work you are seeking, you can focus your intellect and your energy on the challenge it presents. Now you are ready to begin the job search phase.

Here are the five steps: Packaging Yourself; Researching Potential Employers; Building a Network; Selling Yourself; and Making a Decision. In subsequent Career Planning Series installments, we will take a closer look at each of these steps within the context of finding a satisfying position in the law.

How to Search for a Satisfying Position is part of our ongoing Career Planning Series with Ronald W. Fox, Esq.

Previous installments include:

Understanding Career Planning

Evaluating Experience and Skills

Narrowing Your Options

Finding Your Area of Practice Preference

Is Solo Practice Right for You?

Ronald W. Fox is the principal of Career Planning for Lawyers.  Since 1990, he has provided individual guidance to law students and lawyers in transition helping them search for and locate positions consistent with their personal values and their professional goals.