A tour of duty as applied to one's own career

I was reminded of this lately and (I think - although be misremembering) I was introduced to the concept during my MBA studies at Henley Business School as a few of my classmates were ex/current military

In any case, it's the idea that you commit a set period of time to a particular project or chapter of your career. For me, it resonated as in the early parts of my career it corresponded well to the formal study periods of ~3 years to qualify as an accountant and then another two or so for my MBA

Clearly defined start and end points, and outcomes

It naturally lent itself to delivering multi-year projects; first helping DLA Piper set up their shared service centre in Warsaw for 2-3 years, followed by a similar project for Hogan Lovells for 18 months

I then joined the dark/light side (you pick 🙂) as an employee helping Karen Peskett set up an internal consulting capability, before Covid blew through town and trashed the place

I had intended on a 2-3 year tour as a Practice Manager at Dentons to help embed a recent restructure in their Real Estate division, but I found myself promoted after 6 months and realised I'd somehow ended up with a proper grown up job 

Tours of duty were over - it was a residency 🙂 

Whilst I very much enjoyed working with the folks in my directorate and could see what that directorate could become in time, looking back I can see that I failed to define that multi-year tour of duty for myself. I just couldn't get excited by it and found it very wearing (so. many. meetings)

So we go again

The current tour of duty is taking on the challenge of upskilling lawyers' commercial skills. This is a gap and persistent grumble over the 15 years or so I've been working with law firms and while 1000+ startups zig with AI for legal, we can be the 1 that zags to help firms work out what it all means for their business models

We've had a good 12 months creating The Legal MBA training offer for law firms - consulting with L&D professionals and lawyers, creating training materials and piloting a programme for those on the cusp of promotion to partner. We're currently signing up firms for September '25 start dates

More than happy to talk to firms about what they're looking for in this space, we're constantly iterating the materials and training products (we're on version 3) and next on our roadmap is a product to upskill more junior associates - aiming for initial pilots in Q4

Rather than defining this tour in terms of time, I figure we've got 100,000+ solicitors in the UK to upskill, before we need to worry about the next tour 🙂