The only sound career advice I can give is to go for a profession where experience is valued (law, management, ...) and avoid professions where experience is devalued (e.g. programming).
No but I know some lawyers. If you specialize in one domain you can make a lot of money. The more experience you get the better. In contrast, programmers with lots of experience often have a hard time getting a new job. They are considered old farts who are overwhelmed by the 'new' over-hyped technology.
My wife worked as a legal secretary for a long time and still has friends in various law offices. I have been told that corporate legal departments are reasonable pressure, but law offices (as in "Name, Name, & Name") typically are a dog-eat-dog climb the ladder pressure cooker nightmare with insane hours until you become a partner, if you become partner.
If you don't become partner, it means you need to find another company to work for... and it probably won't be a law office because all the law offices in the area know you didn't make partner.
If you do become partner, the hours go from insane to merely crazy. The dog-eat-dog ladder climb pressure cooker nightmare atmosphere remains unchanged.
Management reality check:
Managers climb the ladder, stagnate, or fall off. When they fall off, they have a hard time back on the management ladder because of of all the competition from other management (the ladder is pyramid shaped, not linear, so it gets narrower as you go up). Stagnation typically results in a layoff when hard times come around again, and hard times always come around again.
In my experience (big corporation), managers do not keep up with technology, so falling back to being technical is very difficult.
