Analyzing the Factors affecting Career Opportunities of Office Administration Graduates

in Law Firms in Parañaque City: Basis for Career Opportunities Development program
in Legal Environments

The decision for career choice has been observed to be one of the biggest and
often complex decisions made, not in the financial domains only but also making it a
long-term decision for students' lives (Akram et al. 2018). The important and major
factors contained in this period were institutional quality, their reputation, qualified
academic staff, or even other factors regarding students such as academic
achievements and social life in an institution. However, the concerns compared with
what students considered significant were the other factors on parents' consideration for
students' priority choice. It had also been at this time that early models relating to career
choice had developed further, indicating that there were different phases associated
with the selection of higher education institution. Very little is known pertaining to study
on career choices of students from the Philippines. As per the search in the electronic
database on "career choice," the National Library of the Philippines reported 34 titles on
January 8, 2008. Most of these title affairs deal with the decisions made by students for
their college courses or professions. An international study was performed by Tan
(2019), where the researcher looked at the applicability of major United States college
choice factors with 226 high school seniors in the Philippines. Student characteristics,
along with institutional characteristics, significant others, and institutional marketing.
The legal profession, which keeps the rule of law alive and strives for justice,
must include many aspects that are necessary for social order. Among those cast in this
role are the stenographers, who record ceilings so that there will be proper
documentation of proceedings at the court. In a way, such Mach (2018) states that law
exists within a society, yet possesses an idea for society's own societal needs. It is a
complete social construct to accommodate social activities. Without society, lawhood is
inconceivable, and varied societies have diverse legal rules. Conclusively, those law
firms were found among the top three in the USA, UK, and Australia (Gray, 2018). The
two most challenging issues in the legal profession are the high rates of job
dissatisfaction and the continually rising public interest inducement-attraction
phenomena. The problem has been talked about at length because of the high job
dissatisfaction rates, high attrition rates at major firms, and large numbers of attorneys
who completely drop out of the profession. Unhappy lawyers become less effective for
their clients and discourage the very best students from entering that profession and
lower the profession overall (John Heinz et. al, 2019). A second issue is poor access to
justice for the poor and disadvantaged segments of the community-timely equality is
much talked about nowadays. Although many public and private lawyers are there, even
those few unprivileged clients do not get decent access to legal advice (Legal Needs
and Civil Justice, 2019). These two problems are actually connected in an important
way. The highest-paid lawyers, who usually come from big law firms, are found to be the
most unhappy in the profession, while those who serve in government, public interest
organizations, and educational institutions, are considered the happiest. As Schmidt
(2019) puts it, this may mean that persuading more law students to take on public
service law could isolate both the problem of dissatisfaction in the profession and
disadvantage representation among people with legal needs. Indeed, by attaching the
legal profession once again to the notion of service to society, a professional ethic that
has somewhat disappeared in recent decades, the profession may be improved even
from its own, internalistic perspective and from the positive impact it can and should be
having on society more generally.
The main hurdle resulting in the employability of graduates from Office
Administration in legal offices included a lack of the right internships or even
experience. They noted that these internships prepare the individual for the kind of
workload faced inside an office because even on-the-job experience shows how to
actually do things before completing a task. On the contrary, respondents could not say
they had experience working in legal offices, which gave them a lesser interest and
confidence in seeking employment opportunities within the field. {Anjum, 2020} showed
the solemn impact by way of which the absence of internship experience could affect
students throughout their transition to the working world. Academic internships
essentially serve as a bridge of the gap by producing usable theoretical knowledge as a
supplement to students' proficiency and sharpening their professional development and
experience, while also serving to develop good personal disposition, effective work
habits, and confidence levels of students. These invaluable opportunities would lead
students towards receiving first-hand exposure to practice.
According to a research conducted by Padilla (2020), the listening and
transcription accuracy of stenographers is significantly involved in the reliability and
fairness of legal proceedings. Any errors or mistakes in the court record may have far-
reaching consequences, which may include wrongful conviction, appeal, or even retrial.
The study revealed how much employers value high listening and communication skills
for Office Administration graduates to record everything correctly. They emphasized that
legal offices are contending with the extensive workloads these days, which makes it
really important for individuals to have those skills of listening and communicating well
even under stress. ''This skill is especially needed during court proceedings since the
stenographer should be able to record all the information with absolute accuracy''.
Besides, studies have uncovered how cultural values affect the Career
Opportunities of Office Administration graduates from Law Firms. Culture: the collective
programming of the mind that distinguishes one group of people from another (Arthur,
2019). Velmonte (2022) stated that seminal work on culture dimensions had identified
four most important cultural dimensions as derived from his comparative research of
around forty nations. The first dimension is that of individualism collectivism. An
individual in individualistic culture has been perceived to be an independent entity. In
collectivism cultures he/she is perceived as an interdependent entity. That decision-
making in individualistic cultures were based on individuals' own wishes and desires,
whereas in collectivistic cultures those decisions are made jointly with the in-group (like
family, significant others, and peers), and the primary consideration is maximization of
benefits for the group. The second dimension is power distance. In high power distant
countries, there would be an unequal distribution of power in society and this is
acknowledged by organizations. The third dimension is uncertainty avoidance in the
sense of how much tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity society will allow. High
ambiguity intolerant cultures interpret it as little tolerance, while low ambiguity intolerant
societies have more. Lastly, the masculinity-femininity dimension dealt with the
prevailing values and the highest priorities: in masculine cultures, achievement and
accumulation of wealth is valued and strongly encouraged; while in feminine cultures,
good interpersonal relations take priority.
They signed on for work with the companies while being fully aware that they
were not going to be happy there. This is not an addiction like smoking; I think it is more
complicated because different factors interrelate within one another and affect them
differently. First, many people come into law school without knowing at all what they
want to do after graduation and do not have a job in mind. This renders their job
preferences precarious, having external influences. Second, law firms try it earlier and
recruit students to work in their firms, including huge first salaries, fun summer days,
and whatever else tempts students. Finally, peer pressure and the norms of law school
and the legal profession pull students towards the firm track. Bounded willpower is the
principle that a person sometimes performs acts that are manifestly contrary to his self-
interest in the long run. The standard model of this is smoking: most people smoke
knowing that doing so will eventually threaten their health. Obviously, smoking is
addictive physiologically, but bounded willpower can have a broad range of other
manifestations. A person starting a diet may throw out all of the junk food in her house.
A traditional economist would call this behavior irrational. She is not obliged to touch
any unwanted food, so why not just keep it around, if no one needs to eat it? But: the
dieter realizes she has bounded will power meaning, to put it colloquially, that she is
susceptible to temptation: she does something that she knows is not in her best
interests. She throws out the food so that it cannot be there to tempt her (Jolls, 2018).
First-year associates at major law firms in large metropolitan areas are offered
extremely competitive salaries, for instance $140,000. There are also year-end bonus,
moving expenses, or other start incentives and very lucrative benefits that come with
the positions at such firms. The government pays people less than half that amount,
whereas legal aid pay even less than one-third that, with many paying first-year
attorneys less than $40,000. Considering "actual" salary, however, the averages may be
much more in comparison to the amount of work invested by those in private practice.
Of course, the actual calculation misses many of the big costs of working in a large law
firm that may be less obvious and more difficult to quantify than the salary offers, which
are, after all, pretty explicit and quantifiable. First, the taxes for such individual at this
salary level would be much higher, then he will not benefit from his school's loan
forgiveness. Secondly, this work will really be long hours for a firm associate. For a new
associate at a law firm, working later may often be found to be in the range of 60 to 70
hours or even extend up to 80 hours per week-20% to 100% more than a government
or legal aid attorney (assuming he or she works 40-50 hours a week) (Forstenlechner,
2018. Money and better career opportunities were stated as key motivations for young
associates to join a law firm; these expectations were mostly fulfilled. However, on
entering the labor market, they felt disappointed because of a lack of interaction and
appreciation by the partners, high pressure for billing more, very long hours working,
and lack of work/life balance, as well as not being involved in interesting work and no
international secondments.
Besides that, English can be a secondary language, and it is further used or held
as the official medium in the administration, law, business, education, and media
industries. Also, this is a means used widely for the instruction of technical concepts in a
way that tends to find an abundance of allied references in English, contributing to one's
facility in spoken but especially written communication. For effectiveness in the job
market today, a large portion of employers stacks their plates against job seekers based
on their ability to speak English. English barred a lot of people from entering legal firms
because many do not know English or are shy because of its astute grammar and are
still degree-holders.
To conclude, Job prospects for Office Administration graduates at law firms
depend on several factors which are often interdependent. They include quality of
institution, internship experience, cultural factors, and skills such as transcription
accuracy and English communication. Inhibitors of employability range from lack of
relevant internships to cultural dimensions which cover a wide spectrum of
discrepancies ranging from employer expectation to graduates' preparedness. These
employability issues will then be addressed through appropriate academic training,
improved internship programs, and skills in particular areas such as communication and
cultural adaptability. This would then be seen as closing the gap in the workforce and
meeting the societal needs by raising public service consciousness and work-life
balance within the profession.
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