Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career
    by Herminia Ibarra

    Harvard Business School Press  (January 2004)

    Ibarra's approach to career transition goes against conventional wisdom.

Ibarra's approach to career transition goes against conventional wisdom. Career counselors tell us that successful career change happens in a linear process that begins with first knowing what we want to do and then using that knowledge to guide our actions toward the one "right" job.

This method just doesn't work in real life, says Ibarra. There is no one perfect career waiting to be discovered. Instead, there are many possible selves we might become-and finding the one that fits is the result of doing and experimenting-trying on possibilities through a process of trial and error.

Based on her in-depth research on how people from all professional walks of life make career transitions, Herminia outlines a three-part process of career change: experimenting with new professional activities, connecting with new social networks, and working and re-working the story we tell ourselves and others about who we are. This model is presented through the engaging stories of thirty-nine men and women who made radical career changes successfully, including a literature professor turned stockbroker, a psychiatrist turned Buddhist monk, and a tech manager turned executive coach. Ibarra distills their common experiences into a set of unconventional strategies that others contemplating a career change can use to their advantage.

Switching careers means much more than changing what we do from 9 to 5; it means redefining ourselves. Working Identity helps us along the crooked journey of finding out what we want to do and who we want to become.

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