Book Review: Working Identity
Book Review
Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career by Herminia Ibarra
By the Liberal Arts Dude
I read the book by INSEAD Business professor Herminia Ibarra with great interest because of the rave reviews it has received. Among the accolades were statements like “It has turned the world of career counseling upside down” and “Challenges the conventional wisdom about how and why people change careers.” Pretty heavy stuff, I said to myself, so it must be worth checking out.
The main premise of Ibarra’s book is the way traditional career counselors and counseling directs people interested in career change—think and find your “true self” and implement a plan to get a career that accommodates that identity—is all wrong. According to Ibarra, most real-world examples of successful career shifts actually operated in the reverse of that model. Rather than “think and introspect before you act,” Ibarra actually says the first step to any career change is to “act” or to create little experiments to test out your ideas of a new career to reality, evaluate the results, and see if you wish to go any further with each step reinforcing the feasibility of a new career. Hence, Ibarra’s model says that new professional identities emerge in practice—by doing—rather than by the conventional wisdom of self-reflection and introspection. Ibarra says that introspection and reflection comes later, when, after we have exposed ourselves to new experiences, we have something new to reflect on.
Throughout the book, Ibarra presents case studies of people who, mid-career, decided to jump ship and start entirely new careers. The stories, for example, of: the psychiatrist who becomes a Buddhist monk; a high-level IT manager who becomes a career counselor; a Wall Street financial manager who becomes a novelist; a literature professor who becomes a stockbroker; a high-level corporate executive who becomes a nonprofit consultant; a “career company man” vice president of a pharmaceutical firm quitting his job to head a start up; etc. What these people had in common were an initial sense of dissatisfaction with their lives and careers. Rather than follow the traditional model of thinking about what they would like to do next and implementing a plan to get there, these peoples’ stories followed a more circuitous path that involved a lot of uncertainty, doubt, and emotional turmoil. Sometimes this turbulent period lasted years.
“Is it right for me? Am I making a foolish move? Am I insane for wanting to leave a secure job?” These are all questions the case study subjects asked themselves as they embarked on their experiments of doing—freelancing, volunteering, attending conferences, meeting people in the new field, taking a sabbatical, going back to school, devoting more and more time to their new interests outside of their old jobs. Ibarra says that this period of uncertainty where you craft low-risk ways to test your ideas in the world and to reality is a necessary and vital step in successful career transformation. All the while, our conception and vision of a new life and career gets refined and molded to the reality of what is out there in the world.
My rating of Ibarra’s book—I give it five out of five stars. It is that good and I feel learned a lot from it. As someone who thinks a lot about the issues she writes about (being an amateur career counselor is my hobby) I feel that Ibarra is right on the money as to the process most real-life career shifts go through, and where the traditional “think and introspect and then implement” model falls short. I would say that this book provides a wealth of wisdom to anyone dissatisfied with their careers and wish to make a change.
Despite my high opinion of the book, however, I feel that I must take Ibarra to task on several points:
1) Her case studies consisted primarily of very highly educated professionals in high level positions. These are doctors, executives, MBAs, PhDs, etc. People who have tremendous options at their disposal. What about the rest of us who aren’t high level people in our jobs and whose professional horizons aren’t so broad? Or those of us whose horizons aren’t very broad but we would like to expand our options? What is the process the rest of us go through to get there?
2) Ibarra seems to focus entirely on the emotional and psychological aspects of making a career shift, and neglects the very real and concrete factors that sometimes hinder people from making a leap to a new career (or even taking incremental steps): lack of money for education, lack of time because of family constraints, lack of a marketable and transferable skill with which to freelance, geographic location, etc. For most of us, quitting our jobs is a tremendous financial risk and we cannot afford to do that for the sake of getting a sabbatical. We might be dissatisfied with our current jobs but we still need to pay the bills.
3) There are no stories of people starting again from the bottom in their new fields. Most of the stories were of people who started out dissatisfied in high-prestige, high level positions only to end up in equally high-prestige and high level positions. Or who enjoyed lucrative success their first time out trying a new career, as in the case of the first time novelist who not only completed his novel but in that same year, published it and sold the film rights as well!
Despite these criticisms, however, I would still recommend Ibarra’s book to anyone interested in gaining some practical wisdom on the career change process. I stand by my earlier rating: five stars out of five. For her next book, however, I’d like to see Ibarra focus her sights on us regular working and middle class folks.
Copyright 2005
posted by Liberal Arts Dude at 10:14 AM
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