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Retire as a judge
If you don’t become a judge first, you need to build your career and reputation in the community. You have to get to know people and show them that you know what you’re doing and have good judgment. Then, start training and volunteering as a mediator or arbitrator. find someone who is really good at it, and see if you can shadow them.
Eventually, when you know what you are doing, and if your peers like and respect you, they will ask you to mediate or arbitrate their cases. Word will hopefully spread from there.
Most often, they are retired judges or magistrate judges. Rarely, they are well-respected practitioners that retire from private firms.
You can go through the training with the court or a private group, then get in their list. You need some solid experience in whatever you what as your focus, but some are more general like "commercial litigation." You don't need to be a retired judge or old. The last mediator on one of my cases went into the hospital the week we were supposed to mediate, and a month later was still not better. So age isn't always a plus.
There are many employment mediators who were not judges. The successful ones largely have substantive experiences on both plaintiff/defendant side. At least in LA there's a volunteer mediator program the court runs that allows people to have early mediation experience.
FINRA arbitrations are a way to get started. The pay is low and you may not be picked often, but it's first step and the barrier to entry is low. I once had to do a volunteer day of small claims court mediations and that was a thousand times more educational. One of the only cases I couldn't settle was for $90.