Most valuable skill for the future

The MOST important and valuable skill for the future requires the ability, knowledge, and tools to confidently re-formulate your professional identity over and over again.

Imagine asking your friend, "How's your professional identity re-formulation going?" Instead of, "How's the job hunt?"

The first question is a more accurate question that reflects what happens in a modern career path. No one follows a linear path anymore. Our professional identity is reinvented as we age, gain experience, and have more self-awareness.

Yet, no one asks us about this.

Whenever someone quits, gets fired, or is ready to change roles, they're re-formulating their professional identity, again. With careers lasting forty to fifty years of our lifespan, you better believe 100% of adults will undergo some form of a professional identity crisis and transition at some point.

New career models (e.g. the portfolio career and hybrid career), require new coaching methodologies. That includes professional identity support.

Where are the Professional Identity coaches, guides, and specialists?

Perhaps, a Professional Identity Coach is an example of a new hybrid role that is emerging for the modern era in order to shepherd people through the complex career pathways that are now the norm.

This is different from being a personal branding expert. This work exists at the nexus of adult psychosocial development and career development. However, I don't see degrees or certificates in this field, do you?...(I might just create that).

Back in the day, it was sufficient to focus on advanced skills that moved people up the career ladder. Today, that method no longer works the way it once did. Advanced degrees only add onto our list of professional identities. Workers need to be taught how to hybridize themselves to show how their multiple professional identities fit together into their whole work self.

Stop overemphasizing skills for the future, Start Understanding shifts in your work identity

There is SO much emphasis on skills for the future. Focusing only on skills reinforces what a person can DO and separates the focus from WHO a person is in their work. Skills and identities are both functions of a career. It's not either/or.

If we're putting all this time, energy, and research into debating and developing how to train the future workforce, it seems logical that a critical element to incorporate is professional identity development, but we're not.

Specific tools and supports for professional identity re-formulation are absent in conversations and programs geared towards the future of work.

When was the last time you saw a career assessment tool aimed at professional identity insights?

The Meyers Briggs and other popular tools are personality and skills assessments. They don't focus on making sense of someone's self-concept, which is fundamental to their professional identity.

Until someone can name or commit to their professional identity, they won't understand how their skills map to who they are and why they do what they do and who they want to become.

bring identity into career development and workforce readiness

One obvious framework to borrow from is the Four Identity Statuses, developed by James Marcia. It clearly outlines where someone is in their commitment to their professional identity.

Identity commitment and identity achievement are two factors people are striving to feel. When someone doesn't have these in their work, they usually feel lost, confused, apathetic, and disengaged. That's why this matters.

An overview of the Four Identity Statuses

• diffusion (where no commitments are made)

• foreclosure (commitments without exploration)

• moratorium (actively ongoing identity exploration)

• achievement (where identity commitments are made after a period of exploration)

How to apply the four identity statuses to professional identity development

We can use the four identity statuses to guide career conversations and next steps.

The premise of these four statuses is that as we develop as humans, we eventually commit to an identity. If we commit to an identity after a period of exploration, it's called achieved identity. However, if we commit to an identity without exploring, it's called foreclosure because we settle without trying other identities first. If we stay in the exploration stage without committing, we're said to be in moratorium. And, if we never commit, we're in diffusion.

Although Marcia's framework applies to human development, his statuses make sense in our professional lives.

Take a look at this table on how the four identity statuses flow:

You can see how these four statuses would be useful to unpack how a person is thinking about their job search (moratorium), why a person feels locked into a generic job title (foreclosure), or why someone bounces around from one work identity to another throughout their twenties (diffusion).

Workers going through career transitions and reskilling are also undergoing cycles of identity re-formulation.

Marcia calls these identity re-formulation events MAMA cycles (moratorium, achievement, moratorium, achievement). Essentially, throughout our lives, anytime we face identity-challenging events, we go into a space of moratorium (exploration) until we commit to an identity and enter the achievement phase again. We might even rebrand this to "career MAMA cycles" to make it more specific as a tool in career development.

Research on identity development has huge implications for conversations around the workforce of the future

It's not just about how well we upskill and teach new skills or make more micro-credentials, we must also show people how to re-develop and reinvent their professional identity.

Anyone in the fields of career development, talent management, professional growth, academic advising, life coaching, personal branding, and workforce development should be thinking about, assessing, and adding this language into their work.

We need to start asking ourselves and wondering:

• How are we helping the workforce of the future explore new work identities without penalty or stigmatization at any age and stage of their career?

• Why are workers who are trying to transition locked into old work identities, and how might we encourage them to be more curious instead of falling into identity foreclosure?

• How might we create tools, methodologies, and services that embrace active testing of future work identities instead of only future skill development?