Identity, Meaning, and Subjectivity in Career Development

This chapter establishes the context, purpose, and problem posed by the book. Identity is a construct that influences virtually every aspect of life, including work life. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the construct of identity and to demonstrate why and how it plays a significant role within career development. Through an examination of the construct of identity, its purpose is to offer a rationale for the increasing importance of career development research efforts within our field that hopefully enrich our human resource and career development practices. The chapter will begin with a brief discussion of some of the extant career development research in human resource development (HRD). Next, it will offer some definitions of the construct of identity, followed by a discussion of the proposed characteristics of identity. It will conclude with implications for HRD practice and research that align our work in HRD with the current realities of career development.

This chapter draws the construct of identity into the human resources discourse. It examines identity theory, which is a robust stream of research in Sociology and Organizational Studies, in order to offer ideas about how identity relates to human resource practice. Identity is a multi-level construct that includes individual identity, personal identity, self-concept, and social identity. Each one of these aspects of identity has the potential to enrich what and how we think about human resource and career development practice. This chapter is novel because it interrogates identity from the perspective of the human resource and career development practitioner, rather than identity (mostly considered in the form of demographics, which is one but certainly not all of the ways that this chapter considers identity) from the perspective of the trainee, or employee. In other words, it examines identity of the trainer (or Organization Development (od) consultant, or executive coach, or mentor) rather than identity of the trainee (or employee, or mentee). The chapter presents a framework through which human resource and career development practitioners and scholars can visualize the relationships among and between human resource and career development practices, of human resource and career development practice, modalities (types of delivery), and implications of identity.

This chapter examines identity and explains how identity is directly related to career development. It provides a close examination of three ideas: (1) identity is constructed, (2) identity is fluid, and (3) career success is subjective. The field of Human Resource Development is inter-disciplinary, which is noted in the introduction of Chalofsky et al. (2014, pp. xiix–l). There are foundational disciplines that undergird the field, including sociology, anthropology, psychology, management, education, economics, and philosophy (Chalofsky et al.). The ideas presented in this chapter find many of their epistemological roots in philosophy. Fundamentally, and likely tacitly, when a person approaches a point in their career development in which they are considering a career change, he or she is taking into account a personal sense of self, a social sense of self, and a roles-based view of self. In other words, the person asks “Who am I?” to which answers might be: I am a female, 53-year-old, single, lesbian. A person asks, to what groups or systems do I belong? These could be groups such as American citizen, and Episcopalian. A person asks, what is my profession (or what has my profession been?) These could be professor, educator, Human Resource professional.

This chapter explores the demographics and the tapestried nature of identity, and it provides insights for the ways that matrices can facilitate career development and career success, as defined by the individual. By examining different aspects of demographics, this chapter contributes to the overall construct that permeates the book—that is, that identity is socially constructed, fluid, and tapestried.

This chapter examines different aspects and types of life events and the ways that they can impact career development. Examples of these events include marriage, divorce, coming out as an LGBT person, financial issues, and recovering from addiction or alcoholism. The purpose of the chapter is to explicate different ways that life events can manifest, and different ways that they can impact one’s career development, in order to give “voice” to what might be sources of shame or stigma. The purpose of the chapter is to bring these issues to the forefront, so that HRD practitioners can develop acuity around “undiscussables” and as a result, become aware, sensitive, and equipped to design programs that are attuned to these issues.

This chapter examines factors such as veteran and military status, educational attainment, and serious avocational pursuits. It presents the idea that there are aspects of identity that might not be obvious in relation to career development, but that do impact career development. The chapter includes information about military and veterans and career development. It includes information about education, including the decision to return to school for additional college education.

This chapter presents the typology of career development related or impacted dimensions of identity. The chapter builds upon Chapters 1–7 by synthesizing the information about identity, career success, demographics, and life events, into a model that can be used when thinking about and designing career development programs. The model presents the response to each aspect of identity (life events, demographics, and other dimensions), of both human resource management, as well as human resource development, practitioners. This chapter necessarily draws certain aspects of employment law into the discussion, because the response of human resource management to aspects of identity is customarily through a compliance-based lens. Because the intention and focus of the book is to comprehensively examine identity and its various manifestations, the book examines both human resource management and proposes human resource development responses. For example, when an employee has a close relative who is experiencing a serious illness, the employer is bound by the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to, for a qualified employee, provide time off to care for the relative. This is an example of a compliance-based response to an aspect of identity. The chapter highlights the gaps in the literature about human resource development’s response to these different types of (in sometimes, very commonly experienced) types of identity, and it closes those gaps by proposing ways for human resource development practitioners to respond.

This concluding chapter offers thoughts about the present and the future of the field of HRD, particularly with respect to career development. If the human resource profession can be expanded, to be able to provide career counseling in the liminal spaces of career, such as career transition (which can leave a displaced employee on his or her own), to facilitate the successful acquisition of a new identity, but perhaps also, to offer resources and support that facilitate someone changing the way that they internalize their identity, to look at it as a source of strength, then we are a profession that is agile and nimble. Organizations and corporations benefit, too, as a result of the increased capacity, increased hopefulness and strength that prospective and current employees acquire when they learn how to see their identities from a position of gracefulness and strength.