Hybrid professionals on the rise

This is the english version of the article: Profesionales híbridos al alza, published on 12/03/2023 for the blog of Leasein ,you can read the original spanish version here.

Companies are requesting more and more hybrid profiles to meet their talent demands 👩🏻‍💻 But really, what are they? And, above all, do they exist on the market?

There are more and more profiles of hybrid professionals in demand by the labor market. I am referring to those jobs that combine skills from different disciplines.

Seeing the number of job advertisements requesting this type of professional, several questions arise: do these hybrid profiles already exist in Peru?, how is a hybrid professional profile built?, will they replace traditional professionals?, what Is the market so open to actually hiring this type of profile?

Let me tell you about my experience from the discipline of Law, which is my specialty.

Readapted curricula

If we take a look at the curricula and programs of some national universities and, with greater incidence, abroad, we begin to find Anglo-Saxon terms and other uncommon terms to the traditional legal specialty. I refer to the following: Diploma in Law and new technologies; legal tech; legal design; legal project management; legal operations; digital transformation of the legal sector; programming for lawyers; AGILE methodology for lawyers; among others.

Also, there are already recruiters looking for hybrid legal professionals, for all types of legal teams that exist: in-house legal teams, legal teams from law firms, legal teams from holding companies, among others.

The hybrid profiles market

Are there already hybrid legal profiles in our country? Yes. With humility, I recognize myself within that group of professionals with hybrid profiles. Mine is a profile that even has a strange name: legal designer. It is a kind of combo between a UX designer with extensive knowledge of the legal sector. In my case, I have gone through various design roles such as research, service and product design, and experience design. In fact, this is my favorite.

I know more profiles similar or equal to mine in Peru and abroad. Really, it fills me with pride to see how we ended up realizing that the Law course, so apparently structured and rigid, ends up being ductile and can give rise to developing other roles and skills as it is a science that is part of the Humanities.

How do you build a hybrid professional profile? In my case, everything happened little by little. As my students say, “it flowed” naturally. But it’s not always like this. My path in design stems from my first job abroad. I worked in a startup in the fintech sector and worked in constant communication with the design team.

The design involved me due to the contact with the humanities and the strength in empathy that I think all of us who work in the legal sector have quite developed, since lawyers are often advisers.

In other cases, the hybrid legal professional profile can be born out of curiosity, the improvements we want to implement in our day-to-day lives, or even mere taste.

Will these hybrid profiles replace traditional profiles? I don’t believe it. Currently, there are not many faculties that are encouraged to include courses that encourage lawyers to taste other professional areas, although they are increasing. At least in Peru, law schools continue to have a curriculum mainly aimed at training “traditional lawyers”, which is neither bad nor good.

How open is the market to hiring hybrid profiles? The answer varies for the national and international case. At the national level, very few positions are filled by hybrid legal professionals. For the most part, the few positions that fit this profile are held by traditional lawyers or by professionals from other careers, depending on the company and required profile.

On the other hand, in the international legal market, the demand for hybrid legal profiles is vast, but the requirements are excessive. For this reason, many times these positions are filled by professionals who are not lawyers.

I invite professionals from other disciplines to analyze what is happening in their sector. What are the hybrid profiles that have emerged?

This is the english version of the article: Profesionales híbridos al alza, published on 12/03/2023 for the blog of Leasein ,you can read the original spanish version here.