Career Identity: what is it and why is it important for our employability?

We’ve all heard the term employability – whether you’re a psychology student or not, or even if you’re not a student at all. Universities, job centres, and increasingly workplaces recognise the value of this intangible skill, which is necessary to succeed in the contemporary competitive labour market. But what is employability?

This over-used term tends to be associated with networking, as well as developing occupation-specific skills and abilities. The latter includes – but is not limited to - completing a degree or courses, extra-curricular activities, work experience and volunteering. Together, networking and up-skilling through training and/or work experience is called human and social capital (Eby et al., 2003). Universities which preach about making connections and getting involved with skill-developing activities are correct; human and social capital are a part of employability theory, and there is meta-analytic evidence for this competency to improve salary prospects (Ng et al., 2005). However, this is not the only employability component.

Fugate, Kinicki and Ashforth (2004) proposed a theory which outlines dispositions making up one’s employability. As can be seen on the diagram, Career Identity and Personal Adaptability are as important as Human and Social Capital according to this theory. The rest of the article will show that incorporating Career Identity into your employability efforts is paramount for ensuring career success.

Career Identity

Career Identity is the representation of diverse and diffuse career experiences and aspirations of an individual. If it is coherent, forming a story of one’s past, future goals and the present ‘who am I’, it effectively guides behaviour, allowing the individual to become who they want to be in the work domain. It may sound abstract but realising how important Career Identity is in my personal life allowed me to become a better version of myself, and knowing who I want to be, which in turn allows me to set goals and work towards them, making it more likely that I will achieve my career aspirations, which is predicted by research (Haibo et al., 2018).

My story

Here is my personal example of the epiphany I had about Career Identity:

I am a final year MSc student of Occupational Psychology. After I graduate, I intend to gather work experience, but I would like to go back to academia some day to do a PhD. Like most students, I get email notifications about funded PhD programmes at my university; recently, one included a qualitative research on women’s job crafting. I learned about job crafting in my degree, but when it came to the choice of writing an assignment on job crafting or employability, I chose the latter.

Although I am interested in women’s careers, quantitative research is my strength, and I would prefer conducting statistical analyses over interviews. Also, that PhD programme would start right after my graduation, which is not in line with my plans. Given these preferences, values, abilities and goals, this PhD opportunity was not for me. Yet, I found myself thinking of applying - even though the application would be time-consuming and at the time I had more urgent priorities.

Why did I think of dedicating my limited time to applying for a PhD programme which I did not want to do? More importantly, why did I consider spending years on an intensive project which would dictate my future career, the topic of which was not in line with my career aspirations?

It is because I have not given any thought to my Career Identity. This inherent construct guides our goal-directed behaviour, providing us with a strong, cognitive, affective foundation for employability (Fugate & Kinicki, 2008), creating a story for why we do what we do (Savickas, 2005). It elucidates which opportunities we should take and which chances to pass, allowing us to focus on what is important to us. Without realising the importance of a coherent sense of identity, I would have done the first PhD programme related to Occupational Psychology I could find, because I would not be the author of my career story, but merely an actor or an agent, heavily influenced by the confusing, ever-changing social environment.

Leading Theory

The leading theory of contemporary careers (Career Construction Theory; Savickas, 2013) dictates that we need to become authors of our careers in our professional development journey to ensure career success (Allen, 2011). Indeed, working on Career Identity improves employment-related decidedness and lowers decision anxiety (Lent et al., 2019), increases self-efficacy (Zhang et al., 2019) and promotes wellbeing (Maree & Che, 2020). Therefore, the longitudinal benefits of ensuring a coherent Career Identity are supported by theory and research.

You cannot effectively acquire human and social capital if you don’t know what you’re working towards. To know who you want to become in your career, you need to reflect on your current and past preferences, hopes, fears, personality traits, values, beliefs and norms. You need to think about your career-related experiences; be it what kind of clubs you enjoyed the most as a child, through to the skills that you spontaneously exhibit at work or university. What do you excel at? What do you need to work on to become a better version of yourself? What kind of job would make you want to get up in the morning? Once you answer these (and many other) questions, you are in a good place to develop a story or stories of your career. These stories can guide you, and you can demonstrate them behaviourally (e.g., by the courses you complete) and verbally. For example, you can use the stories of your career in job interviews, confidently explaining to the employer why you are the best person for that dream job of yours, based on your Career Identity.

Final Note

Consequently, it is definitely important to build your network and expertise to help your career, but don't forget that these learning experiences need to come together to build up a coherent picture or story of your Career Identity. What do you think? Did your University or workplace ever mention all the employability components? Do you think it will be easy to develop your Career Identity or have you been doing it all along without knowing it? Comment below!'

About the author

Wika Malkowska is currently studying a Masters in Organisational and Occupational Psychology at Northumbria University.

You can find her on LinkedIn where she is happy to connect and for people to reach out if you are interested in this topic.

Her interests are in Selection & Assessment and Data Science.