How Successful Career Changers Turn Fantasy into Reality
Whether as a daydream or a spoken desire, nearly all of us have
entertained the notion of reinventing ourselves. Feeling unfulfilled,
burned out, or just plain unhappy with what we're doing, we long to make
that leap into the unknown. But we also hold on, white-knuckled, to the
years of time and effort we've invested in our current profession.
In this powerful book, Herminia Ibarra presents a new model for career
reinvention that flies in the face of everything we've learned from
"career experts." While common wisdom holds that we must first know what
we want to do before we can act, Ibarra argues that this advice is
backward. Knowing, she says, is the result of doing and
experimenting. Career transition is not a straight path toward some
predetermined identity, but a crooked journey along which we try on a
host of "possible selves" we might become.
Based on her in-depth research on professionals and managers in
transition, Ibarra outlines an active process of career reinvention that
leverages three ways of "working identity" experimenting with new
professional activities, interacting in new networks of people, and
making sense of what is happening to us in light of emerging
possibilities.
Through engrossing stories--from a literature professor turned
stockbroker to an investment banker turned novelist--Ibarra reveals a
set of guidelines that all successful reinventions share. She explores
specific ways that hopeful career changers of any background can:
- Explore possible selves
- Craft and execute "identity experiments"
- Create "small wins" that keep momentum going
- Survive the rocky period between career identities
- Connect with role models and mentors who can ease the transition
- Make time for reflection--without missing out on windows of
opportunity
- Decide when to abandon the old path in order to follow the new
- Arrange new events into a coherent story of who we are becoming
A call to the dreamer in each of us, Working Identity explores the
process for crafting a more fulfilling future. Where we end up may
surprise us.
