Volunteering, Training Needed for Dispute Resolution

"Keep your day job." That's the prevailing wisdom among dispute resolution professionals about chances for a career in the field. But they also agree that prospects are growing brighter.

     Rapid expansion in applying dispute resolution to conflict situations in the work worlds, schools, family, housing, and community continues to create more career opportunities.

     But opening the gate to a paid position takes some time and money: a 30-hour training program for $500 or so, evening and weekends at Boston-area locations, several hundred hours of unpaid dispute resolution work experience (also called ADR, alternative dispute resolution). Networking during and after these preliminaries at meetings and conferences helps provide information about the field and develop contacts in it.

     An April 9 daylong conference in Waltham, Dispute Resolution in the New Millennium: Educating Practitioners and the Public, centers on professional issues. Developing a Successful DR Practice is also on the agenda. Presenter is New England Chapter of Society of Professionals in Dispute resolution (617-973-9739, ext. 26l nonmembers $155).

     Conference chair and workshop leader Charles Doran is the founder and executive director of Mediation Works inc. in Boston. He became interested in dispute resolution eight years ago while considering entering law school.

     "Helping two disputing parties resolve differences seemed better than advocating for one against the other."

     Doran took a two-year dispute resolution program and was hired by a nonprofit for a 300-hour internship in a court mediation program. "My first paid job was in 1993, part time then fulltime, with a nonprofit housing program, mediating landlord-tenant disputes. I started Mediation Works in 1994."

     Conference workshop leader Melissa Broderick, mediator, facilitator and trainer, entered the field about 14 years ago and found her first job through someone she met at her training program. After years of working for public and nonprofit agencies, she recently switched to start her own Belmont-based practice.

     Among her most interesting current work is mediation and training for the US Postal Service REDRESS Program. "The main focus is employee relationships with each other, helping them hear each other say what they need to say."

     Richard Cohen, executive director of School Mediation Associates in Watertown, has been in mediation full time for 15 years. "I trained in a four-month community mediation internship in 1981, also took a master's in psychology around then to become a therapist, but liked mediation work more. Therapy is slow in producing results. In most mediation sessions, the satisfaction rate is very fast."

     After about five years directing mediation in a couple of Boston housing projects part time and working in other fields to support himself, Cohen joined with someone in school-based mediation to found his firm in 1984. "I now earn what a nonprofit agency director makes."

     Building the firm, he said, involved "presentations about our work in schools at conferences of educators, cold-calling other schools, writing and winning a grant proposal for an experimental program. Every year, more and more schools, elementary through universities, are in peer mediation. We were in the right place at the right time."

     Cohen's latest book, "The School Mediator's Field Guide," just came out, self-published (800-833-3318; $24.95, plus $.50 shipping).

     "Right time, right product, right approach," says Dina Beach Lynch, founder and CEO of Strategic Conflict Management. The 6-year-old professional service firm was profitable by its second year, she reports, and specializes in using dispute resolution in corporate settings.

     "My approach is that individual employees want to resolve their own conflicts, don't know how, make mistakes," she says. "The key is training. We train HR and employee relations people to be mediators."

     A 1988 law school graduate who disliked lawyering, Lynch has completed more than 85 hours of basic mediation training, taught negotiation in 1993, practiced a year with a mediation firm, led one-day seminars on mediation at colleges and universities and leads a workshop at the April 9 conference.

     "Plenty of work for everyone, always a need for people to understand conflict. Use your skill-set to get into the field," she advises would-be careerists. "For example, if you're a computer programmer, the field is dying for software and Website developers."

Click here to return to the top of the page.

Click here to return to the article index.