A helpful framework for navigating ambiguity during career transitions. The flow chart on the last slide is especially helpful. Credit due to Hermania Ibarra of INSEAD Business School.

1. Working Identity
Unconventional strategies for
reinventing your career
Professor Herminia Ibarra
INSEAD Alumni Reunion 2003

2. Three examples
• Harris Roberts
• Susan Fontaine
• Dan McIvy

3. Defining career reinvention
• Change of context
• Change of content
• Subjective perceptions of changing paths

4. About the Study
• 39 in-depth, multiple-point interviews
• 65% men; 36% women
• Mean age 41 (range: 32-52)
• US, UK, France
• Managers and professionals
• Highly educated: 75% have at least a masters

5. Key Findings
•How career transitions unfold
•What increases the likelihood of a
successful reinvention

6. How career transitions unfold
Take two to three years
Not a linear process
Rarely driven by a clear objective
Confluence of “things”
Sensitive to life events
Process by which the old becomes less appealing
while the new gains contour
Gradual escalation of commitment to investments
outside one’s company
Momentum based

7. Identities in transition
How the Reinventing Process Unfolds
Exploring Possible Selves
Asking Whom might I become?
What are the possibilities?
Grounding a Lingering
Deep Change Between Identities
Updating priorities, Testing possible selves,
assumptions, and both old and new
self-conceptions
Outcomes
External change: Changing careers
Internal change: Greater congruence
between who we are and what we do

8. Tools for reinvention
• New activities (experiments)
• New networks, role models and
communities of practice (relationships)
• Significant events (and the window of
opportunity they offer for stepping back to
reflect & reframe)

9. Identities in Practice
Actions That Promote Successful Change
Aspects of Working Identity Strategies for Reworking Identity
Working identity is defined by what Crafting Experiments: Trying out new
we do, the professional activities that activities and professional roles on a small
engage us scale before making a major commitment to
a different path
Shifting Connections: Developing contacts
Working identity is defined by the company who can open doors to new worlds; finding
we keep, our working relationships and the role models and new references groups to
professional groups to which we belong guide and bench-mark our progress
Working identity is defined by the Making Sense: Finding or creating
formative events in our lives and the story catalysts and triggers for change and using
that links who we have been and who we them as occasions to rework our story
will become

10. When people consider a career change
• After a merger or acquisition, when the old social
structures are disrupted and the new context
seems excessively political
• After executive program, if there is no new
challenge or stretch assignment on the horizon
• At a life inflection point, such as getting married,
having a child, turning forty or getting divorced
• After a professional failure, disappointment or
negative review

11. Working Identity
Exploring Possible Selves
Asking « Whom might I become »?
Testing the possibilities
Refining the questions
Identity in Practice
Grounding Deep Lingering between
Change Crafting experiments Identities
Acheiving small wins Shifting connections Becoming an « ex »
Exposing hidden Making sense Trying on new
foundations identities
Living the
Updating goals contradictions
assumptions, and
self-conceptions
Outcomes
Becoming Yourself
Changing careers
Attaining congruence between who
we are and what we do