Talking About Compliance Career Security

Radical Compliance loves to talk about career development issues for ethics and compliance professionals, so we’re delighted to announce today a special webinar that we’re hosting next month in conjunction with recruitment firm BarkerGilmore about how to have a long and successful career in this line of work. We hope you’ll join us.

The webinar will be held on Wednesday, April 16, from 1 to 2:30 pm ET — yes, 90 minutes long, because there’s just so much to unpack about the skills a person needs to succeed as a compliance officer, the state of the job market today, and how to avoid missteps so that you don’t end up in a stalled-out career. You can register through the advertisement on the right side of this page or at the BarkerGilmore website.

Why are we doing this webinar at all? It grew out of a post I published last year debating whether compliance officers need to be lawyers to succeed in their jobs. My view (shared by most compliance officers, I believe) is that no, you don’t need a law degree for any practical reason; having one doesn’t convey any special powers or insight that a good CCO wouldn’t already have. 

BarkerGilmore, however, had published a salary survey finding that CCOs with law degrees did make considerably more money than their colleagues without law degrees. See Figure 1, below, taken from that BarkerGilmore report.

OK, clearly some people out there believe having a law degree somehow makes a compliance officer more valuable; the proof is in the paystub. Well, why? 

Are general counsels insisting on JDs simply because they had to get one, so therefore all other employees within a mile of the legal department need one too? Do compliance officers with law school training have some special gift for managing compliance issues? And even if law degrees do convey some special gift, is that likely to remain the case as corporations’ compliance challenges evolve more towards risk management? 

Those are just some of the questions we want to discuss on our webinar.

Other Compliance Career Issues

Of course, we spend the whole 90 minutes talking about the merits of law degrees. We have several other questions we want to explore too.

Just how big is the ethics and compliance profession, anyway? This has been a pet cause of mine for years, because nobody really knows. We could try to get a sense of things by tracking membership in the Society of Corporate Compliance & Ethics (18,700 in SCCE’s 2023 corporate report), but that number doesn’t include important groups such as law firm lawyers who might move into corporate compliance roles or people who are internal auditors by profession but still work on integrity and compliance issues. Membership in bar associations’ corporate law sections won’t capture what we’re looking for; nor do reports from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

So no clear sense of the compliance job market even exists, let alone whether that market is growing or shrinking. I’m hoping to have some fresh material on this point by April 16.

What skills do you need to be a successful compliance officer?  All things being equal, having a law degree will never hurt your career — but in the real world, all things are never equal; compliance professionals need to make choices about what to study, which skills to develop, and what practices to hone over years of experience. 

To answer those questions I’m especially pleased that two of our speakers will be Ellen Hunt and Haydee Olinger, two veteran compliance officers who experienced the evolution of corporate ethics and compliance firsthand. Hunt, for example, ran both compliance and internal audit at the AARP. Olinger was head of ethics and compliance at McDonald’s for more than 20 years, and now serves on multiple corporate boards. Translation: both panelists have seen corporate compliance evolve from a niche in the legal department to a crucial capability every organization needs for success, and both know that strong compliance capabilities go well beyond what the legal department does. 

What experiences should you rack up for long-term career success? You can have superb skills to be a successful compliance officer, but if you don’t have the right experience along the way you could still end up in a career stall. For example, I know several compliance officers who truly do want to be general counsels, but spent most of their careers on the compliance side — then they get laid off, and find themselves excluded from legal jobs because they don’t have the right experiences. 

Or let’s look to the future of compliance, which (in my estimation) looks like it will depend a lot more on data management, risk assessment, business process design, and the like. What early-career experiences should a newbie seek out now, for those senior-level roles in 2035? What projects should mid-career compliance people take on today, to assure strong career security in 2030? 

In other words, there is plenty to discuss about the future of the compliance profession, to be sure that you have strong career prospects today, tomorrow, and ten years from now. I hope you’ll join us! 

And if you have suggestions for other issues we should explore, drop me a line at mkelly@radicalcompliance.com.