New Year, New Job?
January is a great time of year for lawyers to evaluate their career goals and check their progress to date. Firms are doing the same and are keen for fresh legal talent in the new year. Across Canada, we saw some law firms increase associate compensation, although some firms have been lagging in this regard.
If you’re feeling like it’s time to investigate the next step in your legal career, there are a few things to consider.
1. Why are you looking to move?
Identify any points that are making you curious or even pushing you away from your current role. Are you interested to know how your pay compares to other law firms or organizations, or what other compensation structures are available? Are you curious about other practice areas? Is your practice stagnating? Do you feel like you need more support? Or perhaps it’s something more serious like toxic culture, poor management, poorly distributed workloads, too much work, not enough work, or missing that promotion?
There can be so many different dynamics at play and if you are frustrated, you need to make an objective analysis of what should be improved but isn’t changing. It’s unwise to speak poorly of your firm, but you need to make sure that your career is moving forward.
2. What are you moving towards?
Everyone has their own goals. It might be to increase the caliber of your work or to improve your work/life balance – or do both, they’re not always mutually exclusive!
Quite often we can be focused on leaving our current role that we forget to think about what a better role looks like. Clearly defining your career goals makes it much easier to convince the right employers that you’re the lawyer they should hire. For further guidance on articulating your goals, please see our blog on SWOT Analysis for Lawyers.
We can get so focused on our work at hand, that we miss the big picture. It’s important to check your progress to date and your legal recruiter would welcome the chance to have an open-ended conversation about how your career is moving and the opportunities that might be available to you.
If you’re interested in exploring your legal career options, contact us for a confidential discussion.
Jeremiah Hunter, Recruitment Associate
403.444.1765