There’s a whole range of roles for people who want to work alongside IP professionals and help their organisations run smoothly.
Last Updated: November 1, 2024
Businesses that work with IP need to employ all sorts of other professionals to help their organisations run smoothly.
For example, there are openings for:
- Secretaries and PAs
- IT and systems support professionals
- HR professionals
- Accounting and finance professionals
- Experts in marketing and business development
- Communications specialists (for example social media experts)
- Project managers
- Office managers, practice managers, even chief operating officers or chief executive officers
- Other specialists, such as in diversity and inclusion, coaching and development, talent acquisition or staff training
What these people do, day-to-day, depends very much on the size and type of business that employs them and the role(s) it requires. Although there are similarities between many IP sector organisations, every business runs slightly differently and needs different types of support.
There are three main places that IP business support professionals might work: in a “private practice” organisation (for example, a firm of patent and trade mark attorneys or IP solicitors, or IP barristers’ “chambers”; in the IP department of a bigger company; or in a government department or agency such as the UK Intellectual Property Office.
You can move between the three during your career.
If your employer has more than one office, you may be asked to travel between them to work with different teams. Many UK-based organisations also have offices overseas, and they too will need business support: so you might find you’re asked to work abroad for at least some of the time.
There may also be opportunities to work remotely, depending on your role and your employer’s needs.
This depends very much on the type of role you’re doing. Working in HR will require very different skills to working in, say, finance or IT.
For some roles you may need specialist professional qualifications, for example in accountancy or HR management. For some you may need prior experience, of doing a similar role in IP or another (ideally related) field such as legal or financial services. But every role is different and often your “transferable skills” will be just as important.
Generally, it will help to have:
- An interest in law and/or science and/or business – although you may not use this directly, it’s important to be engaged in what your employer’s business is doing.
- Good communication skills, bags of enthusiasm and lots of patience – these are useful because you’ll be working with people (for example patent and trade mark attorneys, solicitors or barristers) who do a very different core job to yours and have been trained in different ways.
- Accuracy and attention to detail: these matter in pretty much every role in IP.
- Good time management skills.
For some roles, creativity will be important. For others, you’ll need to be good at problem solving. More senior jobs might demand project management skills. A secretary or PA will need to be very organised and good at multi-tasking.
There is a wide range of routes into business support roles, depending on the employer. You may be able to get an entry-level position and train on the job. More likely is that you’ll train in your chosen specialism first and then move to put it into practice in an IP sector business. In the latter case your employer should still give you opportunities to attend external training courses to maintain and develop your specialist skills.
Sometimes it’s possible to move across, or up, from one type of business support role to another. For example, you might start out in a secretarial or PA-type role and work your way up to being an office manager. Or you might begin in HR and discover you’re actually really good at helping with corporate comms and marketing.
You get to work with some really bright, creative people, in (typically) friendly and comfortable working environments. Because many IP sector employers are small firms or departments, there is often a lot of scope for personal development and for making a direct impact on the success of the business. Depending on the role of course, your work is likely to be varied and stimulating. Job satisfaction levels can be high.
The jobs are often financially as well as personally rewarding, because IP is a thriving sector.
Also, you will generally have a fair amount of flexibility in terms of your times and places of work.
The hardest part of “business support” can be working with people in different roles to yours, who may not understand the way you work or the value that your specialist training can bring. Your job is to make the overall business run well and free them up to do what they do best – but that “secondary” role can take a bit of managing and that’s why you need to be a good communicator, listening as well as talking.
A lot of IP work is constrained by deadlines, some legal and some commercial. That can increase the stress levels for everyone in the team, support staff included.
This varies, though do check out recruitment websites that specialise in the legal and professional services sectors. Here are some other things you can do:
- Watch out for recruitment adverts from IP sector organisations, and keep an eye on their website recruitment pages and LinkedIn posts.
- Look in the usual places you’d look for vacancies in your particular profession, focusing especially on legal sector opportunities.
- Register with specialist IP sector recruiters, who often recruit for business support roles as well as for, say, qualified attorneys.
- Be proactive: engage with a company you like the look of on social media and see if opportunities come up to get involved with them.