Career Book Review: Working Identity - Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career
Thu, July 28, 2011 at 12:00 
We have been writing a few book reviews on our blog because we believe in sharing good career related books with you. This particular book written by Herminia Ibarra, we highly recommend as a brilliant and eye-opening read.
Key:
*** We love this book! Go out and buy it.
** A good read. Get a copy from your local library.
* You know what, don’t even bother
Working Identity – Unconventional Strategies for reinventing your career ***
By Herminia Ibarra, Harvard Business School Press, 2004
As much as we may deny it, most of us live lives of quiet desperation. Wanting more, yearning for something better, but trudging along to the tedious 9-5 for its stability, its familiarity and the safety of the monthly pay cheque. Few of us have the courage to change. But even when we do, we go about it in the wrong way, looking for the single moment of clarity, the dramatic split-second when the clouds part and the truth is revealed.
But of course this rarely happens. Not in real life anyway. So argues Herminia Ibarra in her book: Working Identity - Unconventional Strategies for reinventing your career in which she urges us to forget everything we know about career management and to think, as the book’s subtitle implies, in unconventional ways.
Through a series of real-life case studies Ibarra demonstrates that often times our approach to career reinvention seems to be based on false ideas of a static and unchanging self. Popular approaches, she says, fail to take into account the fact that we learn in iterative multi-layered ways and that the most successful people make ‘increasing investments of time, trying out new things on an experimental scale’.
These two ideas: trial and error and an acceptance of our ‘myriad possible selves’ form the basis of Working Identity. Via inspirational true stories and Ibarra’s own research, Working Identity sketches out a three-part process towards career reinvention.
Part one focuses not so much on career management but on what Ibarra describes as ‘identity in transition’. So many of us have fantasies about who we would like to be but never test them. But only by recognising these multiple aspects of our identity can we begin to take the next step towards trying and testing them out to see what fits.
The difficult process of experimenting with our possible selves is the focus of part two, and this is where Ibarra truly excels. Her approach is a more measured, more practical approach to career change, based on realistic expectations of trial and error. Finding a mould that truly fits, she says, is not a problem that can be solved overnight.
In part three, Ibarra touches upon an aspect of career change that is frequently overlooked by career gurus and experts. She rightly draws attention to the fact that ‘we cannot regenerate ourselves in isolation’. A change in career often results in a change in the relationships we have with people around us. Here, the true stories - stories of breakup, divorce and broken friendships - are especially heart rending but nevertheless presented as necessary elements of the process of self reinvention.
Although first published in 2004, Working Identity remains a welcome addition to the corpus of self-help career books. Highly readable, thoroughly engaging and a mere two hundred pages long, it does what all self-help books ought to do: help us turn our hopes into dreams, our dreams into possibilities and, ultimately in the fullness of time, our possibilities into reality.
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