Take a survey about alumni career paths!
Research will yield recommendations for enhancing retention, improving work-life balance
Professor Paula Monopoli
The University of Maryland School of Law is launching a major survey of its alumni and alumnae to better understand their professional and personal career paths. Professors Jana Singer and Paula Monopoli are leading a research project that will explore the decisions graduates make in shaping their careers, rate their satisfaction with those decisions, and offer recommendations to law firms and other legal employers for enhancing career satisfaction and work-life balance in the profession.
The project is being conducted under the auspices of the Women, Leadership & Equality Program in collaboration with the Law School's Office of Institutional Advancement and the Career Development Office, together with the Project for Attorney Retention, an initiative of the Center for Worklife Law at the University of California Hastings College of Law.
“We will learn how our graduates have constructed their professional careers, and integrated them with their personal and family lives,” said Professor Singer. “What are the factors that are graduates view as most important as they chart their careers: compensation, rewarding work, valued colleagues, job flexibility? We hope to correlate employment settings with satisfaction levels, and offer suggestions for legal employers – who are quite concerned with retention issues – about what would make lawyers want to stay.”
The survey will begin with graduates who are having reunions this year (classes ending in 3 and 8), with plans to repeat the survey with reunion classes over each of the next five years until all classes have been surveyed. Limiting the number of classes surveyed each year will enable the law school to reach out to individual classes more effectively, helping to ensure a statistically significant sample size and providing a manageable amount of data.
All survey responses will be recorded anonymously, with individual responses remaining confidential.
“Our graduates purse an incredibly diverse range of career paths. It will be exciting to look closely at the decisions that have shaped their careers and understand those choices’ impact on career satisfaction,” said Associate Dean for Institutional Advancement Teresa K. LaMaster ’95.
Professors Singer and Monopoli plan to issue a report on the survey’s results before the end of 2008. Its release will be accompanied by a series of workshops with graduates to discuss the survey’s results and their implications for law schools and law practice.
“Our hope is that in revealing some of the challenges our graduates face in choosing their career paths, the survey will give us a window into some of their needs,” said Dana Morris, Assistant Dean for Career Development. “This information may help us provide programming related to career decision-making for alums.”
Professor Singer is optimistic that the survey will ultimately help graduates enhance their career satisfaction and better balance their work and professional lives.
“This is a chance for our graduates to communicate with each other, with their law school, and with the legal profession about what matters most in their careers,” she said.
