Vinish: Thank you for having this conversation. I understand there are some interesting discussions happening about Arjun’s career and college.

Rajesh: [with a slight smile] That’s quite diplomatic when you can it interesting. Well, we have built an inhouse practive over the last 20 years, and frankly, we see a great opportunities in legal practice—tech law, IP, corporate governance, and even in policy. However this young man is more fascinated by coding and tech.

Arjun: When our school taught us coding, I just fell in love with it. And there is a great career in tech too.

Vinish: Well, not a bad idea. May I ask you something, Rajesh? What gives you real satisfaction in your work?

Rajesh: Solving problems by building strong arguments, we help clients in their life-critical or business-critical situations, and its a great profession.

Vinish: Arjun, what do you love about tech?

Arjun: Creating solutions, solving complex problems, designing technology that helps people, and it is so fascinating.

Vinish: So, you both think alike, and your aspirations are similar, only that the tools or methods are different. As a family, all of you might have noticed how tech is influencing legal practices, for operations, data, and efficiency. Not only this, we have AI in contract life cycle, data privacy in law, legal and compliance in tech.

Vinish: What if Arjun can apply his technology education in legal domain? There is a hue scope and we can discuss it at length.

Rajesh: But how do we evaluate if such career paths are viable? And frankly, how do we cover the risks for example if he does not find it interesting enough during the degree program?

Vinish: Very genuine concerns, and this is why we have Steering. Steering specializes in exactly this kind of complex decision-making.

Rajesh and Arjun, both: How does it work?

Vinish: Steering does not force your to study law or software; they start by understanding what motivates you at a deeper level. In the self-discovery kind of exercise, you might actually discover that you are more fascinated by justice and fairness even in using technology. It gives you all the chance to explore and self-talk, in your own language.

Rajesh: We did an ordinary experience with a counsellor before.

Vinish: Their approach is quite sophisticated and you being in legal practice might love their attention to detail. They do not ask or build their assessment around the conventional personality tests but they have questions such as “what problems in the world bother you enough that you’d want to solve them?” and “how do you prefer to create impact – through systems, through people, through policies?”

Rajesh: [critical thinking comes into play] Well, it sounds very subjective. How do they validate these insights or apply these learnings to what the students should actually study?

Vinish: Steering has a very intelligent engine that begins with theme analysis. It identifies patterns in the responses and map these to the actual career opportunities with real market data. So if Arjun shows strong patterns around justice + technology or policy + technology, you will see specific companies working on legal tech in those categories, the salary ranges, growth projections, universities with relevant programs, and also connecting you with a few experts.

Arjun: Can you give me an example?

Rajesh: And also, I am not sure what is so special about it? We can find this information online.

Vinish: To Arjun’s question—we worked with a student who loved finance but also cared about environmental issues. So rather than forcing her to choose, we identified “environmental finance” as an emerging field. Our report for this student showed her specific roles in carbon credit trading, green investment banking, sustainable development finance, with reference to a few LinkedIn profiles of professionals, university programs, and market growth data.

Rajesh: I see.

Priya: That’s more useful than I expected. But we are not sure how it addresses how much we have to offer to Arjun by virtue of our experience, network, and our breadth of expertise.

Vinish: Steering’s model is designed around families and parental concerns. Imagine Arjun leveraging your legal expertise in a tech career—he could be building compliance software for law firms by using all your experience. We build these bridges by safeguarding the student’s interest as well as the family’s expectations.

To support their analysis, they show: current market size of legal tech, major companies hiring, typical career progression, salary ranges, which skills are in highest demand. They treat it like an investment decision, not just a personal preference.

Priya: So, the report and analysis are quite detailed? What else do they share?

Vinish: The report has almost fifteen sections. It shares a visual map showing Arjun’s internal thoughts and how his aspirations for skills, work, learnings, and goals are connected towards the career path. The report has a library of useful references, and a very interesting vibes quadrant.

Rajesh: [very practical] What’s their track record? Do they have success stories?

Vinish: We are new but we have worked with a few families in a short time. We have letters from students on their website showing their experiences and interestingly, we are building a knowledge base of career outcomes—to track how their students perform 2-3 years later.

Rajesh: This sounds interesting. I think it really helped us to know about Steering. Give me a day to think about and we shall let you know.

Arjun: Thank you so much, and if possible, can I see some of those questions that Steering asks?

Vinish: Of course, I will share the URL via email and text message. Thank you Rajesh, I understand your concerns and I hope you as a family will take the right decision, collectively. 

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