Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career, Updated Edition

Herminia Ibarra's book "The Career Change Handbook" provides a model for career reinvention that flies in the face of career experts' advice. It identifies the three critical strategies of experimenting with new professional activities and identities, interacting in new networks, and making sense of what is happening in light of emerging possibilities. It also offers action-oriented exercises to help people work successfully through their own career transitions.

Format: Hardback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 17 October 2023
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

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.

Weight: 512g
Dimension: 166 x 245 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781647825560
Edition number: Revised ed