Working Identity

Strategies that successful career changers use—and how to make them work for you.

Nearly all of us have entertained the notion of changing careers. Feeling burned out at work, unfulfilled, or just plain unhappy with whatever we're doing, we long to reinvent ourselves on a new and different career path. But how do we make this transition successfully?

In this update of the groundbreaking classic, bestselling author Herminia Ibarra presents a model for career reinvention that flies in the face of everything we've learned from "career experts"—and is tailor-made for changing careers in today's uncertain world. Career transition is not a linear path toward some predetermined identity, according to Ibarra, but a crooked journey along which we try on a host of "possible selves" we might become. Successful reinvention comes not from deciphering and analyzing our past, but from inventing and testing our possible futures.

Using new examples of people in different stages of a career transition, Ibarra identifies the three critical strategies—experiment with new professional activities and identities, interact in new networks of people, and make sense of what is happening to us in light of emerging possibilities—that all successful career changers use. She shows how you can use these strategies to:



Explore your possible selves
Craft and execute "identity experiments"
Create "small wins" that keep momentum going
Connect with role models and mentors who can ease the transition
Arrange new learnings into a coherent story



Now with action-oriented exercises to help you work successfully through your own career transition, this updated edition gives you the tools to discover a new path and find success in your new career.