You can earn good money as a paralegal. It is a challenging environment but you will make a good income once you become certified to work as a paralegal and get some good experience. You have to attend college and get at the minimum a two year associates degree.
You will be taking primarily legal based classes. You will have to learn basic legal research and how to brief a law case. The course will also have classes in basic law office management. You will have to have basic computer skills like you would need in an office job. But you will also have to know how to do legal research with the computer.
Years ago legal research was done at the library. Today it is mostly done online. But you need to do that research quickly and efficiently. This is a good career but you will not make a lot of money right away. You need to work your way up the pay scale.
Get to work in any law office you can when you are taking classes. Even if you merely answer the phone you still need to be in the law office environment to start getting experience. Even when you do work as a paralegal you will only make a little more than minimum wage. But you will move up quickly with more experience.
The idea is to make yourself indispensable to the lawyer you are working for. This will lead to your value. This will lead to you charging more for your services. Attorneys rely on their paralegals to do all the work they do not have the time to do.
You can earn more money if you specialize in areas of law. This is what lawyers do. So they need specialist to help them run their office. There is more money in litigation work for the paralegal but there is also more expectations and more pressure. This is for you if you can handle the stress.
You will be in charge for most of the trial preparation. You will be blamed if something goes wrong but you will be praised if it all goes right. The government might also be a place to find work. But the larger the city the more competition there is for these jobs. But if you have the right experience and the right contacts you might be able to land one of these government positions.
You have to know going in that lawyers are not easy to work for. Some have big egos and look down on people who work for them. But you might work for one that respects you a great deal for the work you do. The better you do your job the more likely you will command respect. You might be blamed even if you did everything right. This is just part of the job. But if you can learn to deal with this type of work environment then this might be the job for you. Contact your local education center for more information.