To wonder how smart do you actually have to be for some professions?

[Jigaliga]

Inspired by a comment on another thread...

Do you really have to be genuinely intelligent to be a doctor, lawyer, etc? Or is it just putting in the grind and a good education?

I guess to be an academic you would have to be intelligent. To be a barrister too, but maybe not to be a solicitor? What about accountants?

I think YABU,Doctors have a gruelling 5 year study for their medical degrees.When qualified they are still expected to keep abreast of medical developments.My Stepdad used to joke that " hes not a doctor never bothered"! (was a welder) Good education usually helps .

I mean there's just lots of different kinds of smarts. Bet there's loads of guys at CERN who can't read a bus timetable, lawyers, you need to learn and retain a lot of information but nobody wants the kind of maverick thinking that would make you a great innovator, getting kids out the door for school needs a lot of executive function that you would never need as a classics professor 🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️ just a nonsense question really, signed, an academically very clever person xoxox

I am intelligent, but I struggle to learn from reading which kicks me out from law, and probably medicine too. I might have been able to scrape a 3rd in Engineering.

I have worked in healthcare and doctors have to a) learn a lot and commit it to memory for their exams b) know which assessments tests to apply to and how to interpert the results c) know how to search of the answers you don't know d) have to know alot about how to prescribe medication/surgical techniques side effects and keep that knowledge up to date. You can't be a doctor and be less than above average intellegence, because you would be found out pretty quickly. I assume the same is true for law.

But that doesn't mean that some people who are nurses aren't as smart as doctors, or some polices officers are more intellegent that lawyers.

That was a stat given by the course directors at the open events. They were making people aware it’s not a free pass. That’s on everyone taking their LPC nationwide - not the uni I was in. I’m sure some law schools have better outcomes than others for obvious reasons.

Well since you have decided to start the response with an insult to my intelligence I won’t dignify your post with a response. Just in case you were worried about me being an idiot as you have implied and suggesting my response wasn’t justified - my IQ is 154, I have a number of degrees and I went to both private and state school so I stand by my response. Private schools aren’t better. It’s so narrow minded to universally think this.

In reply to the first paragraph: I have never noticed this as a phenomenon. In 1980, Fred Housego won Mastermind and he has always stuck in my mind, so I'm sure I would have noticed. He was feted for having won in spite of of "just" being a cabby.
In reply to the second: and?

What I meant was that most who passed high school, could pass law school, with "a bit of study" - (by which I mean, reading the cases, making notes about the key concepts, practicing law exams). Success at law school is far more likely with diligence than IQ.

I have no experience of the other professions, but for accounting, you can't rely on just hard work or just cleverness to pass the exams, you need both, and you can't keep working if you don't pass the exams.
Re nepotism: These days for the big firms you need to go through the online process and the initial rounds with HR before you get anywhere near a hiring manager who probably won't even be the one you work for. I now work in a very large investment bank - our apprenticeship scheme actively recruits young people with talent who don't have degrees or an 'old school tie'.
It's not like smaller firms where the guy (and its always a guy) in charge sees a few people and offers a job to the one they get on with best.
My guess would be that with a big employer, the process is much less personal, and an application is more likely to be assessed 'blind', at least initially, so is a good way to get your foot in the door of the industry.

Are you a lawyer? I am, and I’ve never met a PA more intelligent than my colleagues. Organised, yes, but super bright people would probably not go into that role if they could be the lawyer instead (why would they? 5x salary probably).
In response to OP’s weird heirarchy of academics/barristers/solicitors, I don’t find that holds true at all. All three roles require a slightly different skill set e.g. a barrister would have to be a very confident and convincing presenter but it doesn’t matter so much if they’re good with clients or have a bedside manner. In all three roles, you can probably get by with slightly above average intelligence with some hard graft (and a lot of confidence), but in my experience the very bright ones stand out very quickly and will be noticed and rewarded. The most successful lawyers I know (whose work would be featured in national newspapers) are all state educated but standout intelligent. And obviously there can be a difference between magic circle type lawyers and those at smaller firms, though not always - many people actually do make a lifestyle choice not to do the 3am finishes and take a lower paid role to facilitate that.

Not to be a solicitor. I have come across some very thick ones. To be a good solicitor though you need a decent level of intelligence as with most professions. Hard work is also necessary. Intelligence alone doesn't get the job done.

Also, I’m not sure why you think lawyers don’t require critical thinking - in many legal roles that is the key part of the job. Quite a bizarre assertion.

Based on the very small number of people I know well enough to comment on. I would say that the majority of people I know in 'professions' are academic clever. They are good at learning, so they retain knowledge well, are good at following formulaic ways of working that give the desired results. They are generally rule followers. They are great at pub quizzes for their areas of interest. Do well in academic settings and understand and have learnt how to use social interactions to reach their desired outcomes. They can work the room.

The people who work in small businesses, entrepreneurs have a different kind of clever, they are relentless questioners, they want to know everything. But don't retain a huge amount of knowledge and are not so great with formulaic ways of working. They are rule benders and usually hopeless at keeping records, sorting paperwork so others can follow. They are rubbish at pub quizzes as they rarely retain general knowledge. However they are excellent at any logic puzzle type rounds. Id say they are more take me as you find me as they may understand social niceties but will not necessarily follow the rules so are unlikely to be able to climb the corporate ladder though social connections.

To be a doctor, you must have a high IQ.

@HotCrossBunplease
https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/40-of-lpc-students-not-getting-training-contracts-/5105248.article

40% of LPC graduates don’t go on to qualify. (2020)

The pass rate of the LPC was 47.8% in 2022.

I’m not good with stats but doesn’t sound like 1 in 8. Still a lot to invest and relatively high risk.

Most of my friends are solicitors or barristers at top firms and, honestly, as much as I love them, not a single one is more intelligent than my PA or the Ambassadors I work with.

Cab drivers who’ve passed the Knowledge have either naturally retentive minds or have successfully trained themselves to retain large amounts of information, so surely it was never at all surprising that a cabbie won Mastermind?

Back to the OP I do agree academia is only one measure of intelligence, my DH got one GSCE, a D, is dyslexic, did a useless degree so he could join a graduate scheme and has earned 6 figures since his mid 20’s. We are both intelligent but in totally different ways.

They've actually done studies on this and in terms of "raw" intelligence tests - there is the same distribution of very intelligent and not intelligent people across all professions.

So no, you don't have to be intelligent to get into an "intelligent" job. But you'll need to work hard

I strongly believe alot of life is just the luck of the drawer and what family you’re born into. I don’t mean just elite families but for example I’ve never known hunger or cold and my parents have always supported me.

Don't you think it's quite weird to "rate" your actual friends' intelligence against each other? Seems a little insecure.
I am a lawyer, a lot of my friends are lawyers and a lot aren't and it would never occur to me to "rate" their intelligence against each other.
Aside from which it seems totally impossible anyway- my closest friends are a teacher and a charity manager- their skills are so different from legal skills that it wouldn't be possible for me to just rate their intelligence comparatively without some kind of baseline measurement like IQ or a standardised test.

What I mean by this is that there will be v intelligent people in min wage jobs and ditto not intelligent people in "professional/academic" jobs. So they've found when you study intelligence

My DH has a brain the size of a planet. Took a first from Oxford, won prizes as a Pupil, KC, corporate bar and a niche sub specialty of it. Learnt the piano in his 30s, has learnt passable Russian, etc.

Give him a car boot and a full quota of holiday luggage and he cannot see how it fits in - at all. He is similar about many practical things.

You've taken what I said a touch too literally.

No one sits there rating their friends intelligence, obviously. But, in terms of logic and critical thinking skills, I can safely say that my friends do not have as much of them as my PA does.

And, as I said in my first post, there are two types of intelligence - book smart, and world smart. I'm talking about the latter.

To be a doctor, yes very intelligent but especially to have a good memory. You also need to be very hardworking and resilient.

I’m a chartered accountant (ACA) and those exams were the hardest thing I’ve ever done and I LOVE exams (I have a law degree that I did part time while working full time and that was a piece of piss!)

I can’t tell you how many times I was in tears, how often I thought I’d never manage to do them all and qualify.

For the accountancy exams you have very little input per module, a matter of days worth of teaching and the rest is self taught. So you need to be able to understand the information, go through very long winded questions (multiple pages of info) and be able to interpret the information, apply the right standards, do calculations to varying degrees of difficulty. There’s a lot involved and there are absolutely people who cannot do it.

It’s very much pass or fail, you’re not going for a “score” you’re just hoping you’re at a good enough level to pass within the short window you have to learn the materials (usually a matter of a few weeks start to finish for each module, often more than one exam at a time depending who your training control is with and what their expectations are).