16 BEYOND QUALIFICATION
A future that’s right for you.
Qualifying as a lawyer is an important milestone and is just the beginning of your professional development with us. Joining one of our practice areas as an associate, you’ll have access to a suite of associate development programmes that have been designed to build the core non-technical skills that you will need to progress your career and meet the demands of your new role. These include client skills, people management, and managing deals with maximum effectiveness. As an associate, you’ll continue to be given challenging experience on deals, and will become responsible for increasingly complex elements of the transactions on which you work. We’ll also give you the opportunity to spend time working in other offices; last year we placed hundreds of people on both long and short-term international secondments. These placements provide opportunities to increase your technical knowledge while learning more about other cultures and global markets. After around five years as an associate, you will be considered for promotion to senior associate. At this stage you will take on significant new responsibilities, including the supervision of trainees. Knowledge- sharing and developing others are fundamental to our firm’s culture, and you will be well supported in refining the skills and behaviours necessary to help your trainees and junior associates to progress.
Beyond that, there are many career paths you can take, including partnership at our firm. We have a strong tradition of promoting our people and last year we promoted 24 new partners across our firm. Life beyond A&O We want all of our trainees to develop long-term, rewarding careers, and we recognise that for some of our people, their futures may lie either partially outside the firm with A&O affiliated businesses or with another employer altogether. Many of our alumni are now pursuing successful careers as general counsel at multi-national corporates and banks, senior executives on the business side of our clients, and key influencers at regulatory bodies. Others will use their experience as a springboard to launch different careers in law, business, charity or politics. This is a natural part of the life of a major law firm and we will support you in making the choices that are right for you at every stage of your career – even if that means moving away from our firm. We currently have a community of over 8,000 alumni in 70 countries. Through this network, you can share experiences and make new connections that lead to business and career development opportunities – including the possibility of returning to the firm one day.
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