Positioning career identity construction: identity work and identity status models

To date, little has been done to illuminate the process of identity content construction, how individuals use exploration to construct career-identities, or how identity construction processes function at both the personal and social level. In response, the purpose of this paper is to explore the theoretical contribution of recent research carried out by the author into the nature of career-identity and its construction. Firstly, a grounded theory study of 36 Generation Y graduates from U.K. and Irish universities resulted in the development of two models: a Cycle of Individual Career-Identity Construction (CICIC); and a Conceptual Model of Individual Career-Identity. These models demonstrate that Generation Y graduates have fluid rather than stable career-identities, that they put emphasis on personal over social identity, and that they construct and reconstruct their individual career-identities over time, primarily through sense-making processes as opposed to identification processes. Secondly, this paper makes a further theoretical contribution by attempting to locate the CICIC within extant literature, while integrating concepts from pragmatism, identity work, sense-making, and identity status models to advance our understanding of career-identity construction as a process. Practical implications include a review of retention strategies and career counselling interventions.