After finishing her A-levels, Harriet Manley knew university wasn’t the path for her. “I’m very much a home body,” she says. “And knowing I didn’t want to go to university, the CPQ apprenticeship gave me the route to work around family life, and I can study as and when I like, which makes it super flexible.”
Harriet joined a local law firm as an apprentice receptionist and steadily progressed to trainee lawyer in the family department, where she now handles her own growing caseload. “I started as an apprentice receptionist, then worked my way up… and now I’m a trainee lawyer. That’s been in about a five-year period – maybe slightly less.”
Her passion for law, especially family law, started early: “I just like how it’s so real and affects people on a day-to-day basis.” This real-world focus helped guide her decision to study via the CILEX CPQ route with Law Training Centre.
For Harriet, the flexibility of studying online has been crucial: “I can study at 5am, I can study at 2am. It doesn’t matter. I can study whenever I like. I can study in the garden. I don’t need to be sat in a lecture hall. It’s very, very flexible and the tutor is amazing. He comes back to me super quickly with any questions I’ve got.
Balancing full-time work and study hasn’t been without it’s challenges. “There’s definitely moments where I felt a little bit stretched,” she says. But thanks to a structured routine and support from both her workplace and Law Training Centre, she remains on track. “It fits around my job. I can just look into my online textbooks and I can revisit topics whenever I need to.”
Support from her tutors made a real difference. “They’re amazing,” Harriet says. “If anything is unclear the tutors will reword it and explain it in a slightly different way.” She also appreciates the extensive learning materials available: “We have an online textbook, which is helpful. You can highlight online and add your own notes to the textbook if you like. I find the CILEX textbook very clear.”
She also pointed out the benefits of online mocks: “I find the mock exams the most useful that are put on the Law Training Centre website, and I can send them to my tutor to mark, or there’s often the answers there anyway. They’ve been the most helpful for me because they give you a good sense of what you’re going to be sitting an exam on.”
Harriet has big goals, and not going to university definitely hasn’t held her back. Her experience working alongside lawyers every day means she doesn’t feel behind her peers who went to university and took the ‘traditional’ route: “Because I’ve been working alongside lawyers for 4 or 5 years now, you see so many different things that you need to come into that you might not necessarily have seen if you had gone to university.”
Her advice to others considering an alternative path into law? “It’s definitely something that I would recommend to people who do want a career in law without going the traditional route. It’s very flexible when you’re able to work from your bedroom, work from your home office and even work from your garden. So yeah, it’s really, really great.”
