Dr who?
People bang on a lot about 'identity' in relation to work and career. Me included.
Yet we can too easily bandy the term about without specifying what we mean by it in the particular instance, or what it means for us.
When someone is leaving behind one type of work, industry or profession and embracing another, we talk about it involving a change in their working identity (see, e.g., Ibarra, 2003). And that’s certainly a very helpful and well-used concept for understanding why we feel the way we feel when we anticipate and then go through the process of making a significant career change and everything that comes with it.
Yet there are other ways of looking at identity in relation to work that go beyond identifying with a particular role, profession or world.
In a comment on my recent post about another much-bandied-about-and-insufficiently-defined term - ‘retirement’ - someone talked about her identity being that of a 'worker' (as opposed to a retiree). This seems to me another thoroughly helpful and clearcut use of ‘identity’, both for conveying one’s status to other people (should it be any of their business) and for feeling secure in it oneself. This kind of high-level definition matters most, perhaps, when others see us as something we’re not.
I would argue, too, that work identity can be something cumulative rather than shifting. Looking back at the disparate things that have comprised my own working life to date, I don't really see it as a series of identity changes, nor a search for an identity, nor a steady progression towards something that is most ‘me’. Much of what I've done was dictated by the necessity of finding work of any sort and in a limited geographical area.
If anything, then, I see my identity as ‘someone who does disparate things’.
Looking more closely at what I’ve done, my work identity might also be ‘someone who likes to make sense of things and to make them make sense for others’. Or ‘someone who shines a light on the small but significant things that are getting missed in grand narratives’.
In that sense, therefore, my identity is to be found in the way I go about things and the fact that I have gone about multiple things, often concurrently – disparate, maybe, yet also somehow congruent.
And that kind of identity, even if not fully in your awareness, can help you to go for and to embrace those bigger shifts from one place to another – shifts that are rightly called changes of working identity – because you carry that continuity across borders. You find the familiar on the other side. And the familiar is you.
Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash