Working Identity

appendix

studying career transitions

HOW DO PEOPLE CHANGE CAREERS? Organizational researchers have rarely asked this question so simply and straightforwardly. Certainly, many have studied how people adapt to new work roles and how their organizations teach them the ropes by putting them through formal and informal socialization experiences. But most of this research was done in the time of the “one career” career.¹ We learned a lot about what accounts for advancement and mobility within a single path but created relatively little knowledge of the sort that might be useful to the person who seeks a change of path.²

Whereas career reinvention is by no means a new phenomenon—we can look to Dante Alighieri, who wrote the Divine Comedy at forty, and ...