“If I’m a hybrid professional, what am I an expert in?” It’s a legitimate question because it sounds hypocritical to say you need to find your expertise but you can also be good at everything. I promise, you can be both, and here’s how.

There’s a distinction between possessing multiple work identities and being a hybrid professional. From the outset, the terms may sound interchangeable, yet they represent two different concepts and ways of working. Just because a person does marketing, sales, product development, event planning, and social media in their job—portraying they have multiple work identities—doesn’t mean they’re a hybrid professional.

Hybrid work is on the rise, so start noticing it on job boards! Postings seeking hybrid professionals are appearing in more search results, but do you know how to spot them? It’s important to understand what to look for and how there are different clues embedded within job descriptions that signal this is a job for a hybrid professional.

Here are my five tried and true tips for showcasing hybridity during the interview process to: a) differentiate yourself from the competition, b) leverage your “multiple identities” as a strength and not a weakness, and c) help others (i.e. employers) quickly make sense of why you’re bringing more to the table then what they expected.

We want employers to see us the way we see ourselves. If we come across as a list of generic job titles or disparate roles, employers won’t understand us. Our true value won’t leap off the page. This is the problem hybrids face when we’re capable of doing so many things.

Hybrid professionals exist everywhere, in all sectors and across all demographics. To notice how hybridity has entered into and influences our workplaces, work culture, values, and professional identity, it’s important to hear stories about hybrids in all spaces.

Intersectionality argues that you can’t separate a person into parts. You have to look at how race, class, and gender (and a host of other identities) interconnect to form the entire picture of a person’s lived experience. This concept was revolutionary to me at first, and then obvious once I saw it.

Who’s heard of the hybrid job economy? Or hybrid roles? Or hybrid professionals? A few of you, but not many. That’s about to change because…work is rapidly changing.

Yesterday, a man told me he didn’t think the concept of hybrid professionals was profound.

Wondering what books inform my thinking about hybrid professionals? Well, if you're curious about this topic and want to read more about the changing landscape of professional identity, check these out:

But, professional identity is actually a spectrum. You don’t have to be one thing, or one thing at a time, or even a list of things. It’s possible to be multiple identities at the same time.

The plight of being a hybrid professional is that you need career opportunities where you can integrate, instead of segregate, your professional identities together, making it difficult to find roles where you won’t be pigeon holed as one thing.

Use math to add your identities together.

Instead of being a string of past roles and responsibilities, hybrids are masters of combining multiple professional identities together into a robust recipe.

Hybrids are masterful at finding ways to crossover and “hybridize” their work so that there’s a bit of what they love mixed into their daily grind.

A hybrid professional is a worker who integrates multiple professional identities together and works at the intersections. Their value add lies in the intersections of who they are.