Firstly there needs to be a career to develop. This requires thought and planning. In many upper strata families this is an automatic choice still. The firstborn son will go into the army, the second born son will go into the legal profession and if there’s a third born son, he will trot off into the church and become a vicar. With efficient career development, then he should become a bishop after a suitable period of service.
That’s all ok for the top set of very established families but for the rest of mankind, there is quite a lot more to be carried out. Firstly, there are so many more vocations available today that will require a full university education, at least if someone wants to really achieve great things. When children go through the various key stages of the UK education scheme, there is some expectation that parents and family members will have chatted to a student and helped them to think seriously abut what they want to do as a working member of society – and this will inevitably involve many years, so choosing the right career path is very much the aim of the game as early as possible. There will always be those candidates who think they want to go into say, law, but then discover they have no aptitude or just simply hate every minute of it. They will have discovered that sad fact early enough to change course without too much problem and before vast sums of money have been laid out on ensuring the right subjects are chosen at school to facilitate taking the correct set of subjects at ‘O and A’ level and hopefully before setting off to university. However, even then it is not too late, there is usually an industrial year built into a proper career focused course so even if the day-to-day studies do not send a quiver into the student, a quick survey of their year-end results and study pattern will highlight that there could be problems further down the line.
So assuming the school provided the right lower-level stuff, and enough knowledge is passed to the student to take the standard set of exams at lower 6th and upper 6th levels a school, then entry to the right university should be a breeze. Hard work and concentration on the job in hand will always pay off. There is a need to get a training contract to join a legal firm, and this has to be applied for early on with all sorts of character and study profiles taken into account. However, if the law firm is known to the family, there is often a huge waiting list or queue for these hallowed places, but a candidate can often leapfrog the queue if the ties are long term. There is no doubt however that in the end, nothing will gain success in any field without sheer hard work and commitment, many a training contract to become a solicitor has been known to slip away out of grasp.
