What is professional identity development and why we need it in companies
Who are you really in your work?
Most of us don't know. We literally struggle to answer that simple question.
The "who are you" question is the gap we forget about in professional development and talent management because we're too focused on increasing performance, engagement, skills, competencies and "career advancement." Yet, all of those things hinge on knowing ourselves first and foremost.
If you don’t know who you are, then you can’t become the professional you want to be.
Employees and employers use job titles to define who they are. However, our professional identity is not our job title, instead, it’s the way we see ourselves in our work. Professional identity sounds like,
“My job title is Program Manager, but I see myself as an Idea Architect because I’m responsible for putting together a lot of new things and operationalizing them strategically.”
What is Professional Identity Development
Professional identity development (PID) is the process of helping workers understand and communicate their sense of self in their work, essentially answering the question “Who am I in my work.”
This includes how workers see themselves, how they want to be seen, and how their unique career goals, talents, interests, abilities, and skills align together. Professional identity also encompasses a persons values, ethics, and behaviors. How you conduct yourself in your job or career is a reflection of who you are.
Typically when we ask someone, “What do you do?” they say:
“I’m a program director,”
“I work in sales,”
“I’m a jack-of-all-trades, I do a bunch of things,” or
“I’m a good organizer, multitasker, relationship builder, fast thinker, and strategic planner”
These answers aren’t clear or precise. In fact, the word “DO” focuses on skills rather than your identity. What we want to know about a person is who they are and what value they bring to their role. After all, people are more than their job titles. Yet, without professional identity development, most employers and workers don’t know how to talk about who they are. That’s because they haven’t been trained in this.
PID often comes in the form of professional identity development training, workshops, or courses that are part of a program of study in college or can be embedded in professional development programs in companies.
The goal of PID offerings is to help a person discover how they see themselves and who they want to be in their career. In order to grow into being a successful professional, a person needs special skills as well as an understanding of who they are. Personality assessments are one tool to help someone understand themselves, but self-knowledge most often comes from reflective exercises and scenarios where you are forced to consider how you do what you do. I call this witnessing your identity in action.
PID is a required component of coursework for doctors and lawyers, but it is not yet required in other fields or industries. It is required for those professions because it has been seen to improve how doctors and lawyers perform, show care for patients and clients, and conduct themselves with strong ethics and sense of purpose. More Than My Title began offering professional identity development trainings in response to seeing the deficit of
Benefits of Professional Identity Development
By providing training and guidance around how to develop a person’s professional identity, the benefits are multifold. Having clear knowledge of your professional identity has been studied in medicine and law and proven tremendous results in those professions. These results translate to all professionals which is why professional identity development should be something everyone experiences, yet this training has not yet reached the mass market.
Benefits of Professional Identity Development have been shown to achieve:
increased sense of self
increased morale in work
increased purpose in work
increased performance
less mistakes and errors
increased retention in a field
These are results that any employer would hope for, which is why PID is a powerful type of professional development.
Professional identity development falls into workplace wellbeing, retention, resilience and employee engagement because it is about developing our sense of self as much as it is about our mental health and sense of belonging at work.
How to kickStart Professional Identity Development in companies
To kickstart professional identity development, it’s best to bring in an expert or someone who can facilitate this work with your staff. It might be a daylong retreat coupled with ongoing coaching to help employees along the process of getting to know themselves authentically and deeply.
One of the starting points of professional identity development is asking yourself these questions:
How do I see myself in my job?
How do I want to be seen?
Who was I in my work ten years ago?
Who am I in my work now? ...even if I have the same, or a similar job title!
Answering these questions may not be as easy as you thought. Or, maybe you've never even tried to answer them before. I see this all the time. There are many more activities, but these are the initial questions to get started.
The goal of these questions is to help employees feel empowered about their identity at work. They are more than their job titles, and they need space and time to determine how to communicate the way they see themselves in their roles in order to feel more belonging and connection to their team, colleagues and company goals.
The next steps involve the full team, coworkers, and manager so everyone can build shared understanding of each other. You’ll want to share your professional identity with them and use it to have better conversations about your work and expertise.
The thing about professional identity development is that it goes hand in hand with career development, professional development, upskilling, reskilling, reinventing ourselves and a host of other factors critical for workforce performance and retention.
Professional identity development is a core component of workforce training and development.