CONCEPT
Working Identity
Ibarra's central construct — the practice of ongoing professional self-construction through experimentation, distinguished from identity as a fixed possession to be discovered through introspection.
Working identity is Herminia Ibarra's foundational reframing of professional self-concept, developed in her 2003 book of the same name and refined across two decades of subsequent research. The concept rejects the possession model of identity — the idea that a true self waits inside you to be discovered through reflection — and replaces it with a practice model: identity as something constructed through action, tested through experimentation, and continuously revised across a career. A working identity is never finished. It is the living configuration of selves a person is currently inhabiting, the provisional hypotheses currently being tested, and the narrative thread that connects them. The AI transition has made this framework not merely useful but urgent, because the skills-based professional identities it disrupts were built on the very possession model Ibarra has spent thirty years dismantling.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The working identity framework emerged from Ibarra's early research at Harvard and INSEAD, where she followed professionals attempting major career changes — investment bankers becoming nonprofit leaders, corporate