What Is a Career Narrative?
A career narrative – very succinctly – is the story you craft about your professional journey, skills, experiences, and aspirations.
A career narrative is a crucial part of your personal branding and your career positioning. It transcends the simple listing of jobs and responsibilities. It must weave a coherent and compelling story that resonates emotionally with your audience – hiring managers, stakeholders, and investors.
Your career narrative shapes how others perceive you and can significantly influence, if not outright determine, your professional opportunities.
Why Is a Career Narrative Important?
Human beings inherently think in stories. This is important, when combined with the meta-analysis from Harvard which indicates that people make emotional decisions and then rationalize them afterward (see Emotion and Decision Making).
Of course, this applies to hiring and promotions…
Emotional Decision-Making in Hiring
Hiring decisions are not purely rational. They are often based on a mix of intuition, gut feelings, and emotional reactions.
After making an initial emotional decision, hiring managers then seek out logical reasons to justify their choices to themselves and others. In fact, if you’ve been involved in hiring circles, and heard terms like “they are a good fit” or “what a promising candidate” or “I trust her the most”, as the main justification for a hire, you are likely witnessing emotion-led decisions.
In this context, crafting a powerful career narrative allows you to create an emotional experience for people you interact with, giving you a distinct advantage in the hiring process.
The Power of Storytelling
Of course, trying to create an emotional experience in the course of an interview or a networking interaction is extremely weird! Don’t try to do that!!
That’s where stories come in…
Stories are compelling because they enable you to create an emotional experience in a socially acceptable context. They also, equally importantly, create connections.
Given these two factors – prevalence of emotion driven hiring decisions and stories as emotional experience delivery vectors – a strong career narrative becomes an incredibly powerful tool.
It can make you stand out in a crowded job market by highlighting your unique experiences, strengths, and aspirations. It helps others understand not just what you do, but why you do it, and what drives you. It makes others relate to you, and enables them to see parts of themselves in you.
This emotional connection, especially for key positions such as upper management and executive roles, can be the deciding factor in whether you get the job offer or not.
Of course crafting and delivering a compelling career narrative is easier said than done. In order for yours to be effective you have to get a few ducks in order, starting with your professional identification straight…
What Is Professional Identification?
Professional Identification is a type of social identification that reflects the sense of oneness – or self identification – you have with your profession.
It is, in very simple terms, the degree to which you define yourself as a member of that profession.
This identification influences your behavior, your goals, and how you interact with others within your professional sphere. It shapes your career trajectory and how others perceive your commitment and fit within the profession.
And in the context of this discussion, your professional identification drives and determines your career narrative.
Simply put: how you see yourself in the context of your profession, determines the stories you tell about your career, which in turn determines where you end up.
Your Professional Identity Is Negotiated
Your professional identity is not solely defined by what you say or think about yourself, nor is it just what others say about you. It is a negotiation between your self-declaration and society’s recognition.
On one hand, it’s something you declare through your words and follow up with your actions. On the other hand, it’s something that society “grants” you.
The Dual Nature of Professional Identity
For instance, let’s say you decide to become an accountant. Telling others that you want to be an accountant and attending school to become one make up your part of this equation – it’s your side of the story.
But it doesn’t stop there…
You also have to graduate, become licensed, and get employed as an accountant, either at a firm or for clients. That’s the part where society grants you your accountant-ness.
What’s crucial to understand here is that establishing your professional identity involves a negotiation between you and society. It’s a give and take. To win that negotiation and have the career you desire, society must buy into the role you want to play.
Achieving Your Desired Professional Identity
To achieve the professional identity you desire, society MUST buy into the game you want to play. There is no other way around it.
Of course, it usually starts with you. You have to start by deciding and declaring what you want. But it doesn’t end there, it just begins there.
In other words, it’s not enough to simply declare yourself a CEO on LinkedIn and expect job offers to come your way. To actually become a CEO, you must either build a successful company or be hired to lead a real organization.
With this understanding in mind, and recognizing that you need to generate buy-in from the world for the role you want to play… We are going to give you a powerful key…
DO NOT LET CIRCUMSTANCES DICTATE YOUR PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY.
Or in more colloquial terms:
Refuse to Be Put in Your Place
Never settle or accept being put in your place, period.
Your current circumstances may, and likely do, influence your level of satisfaction with your career, that’s natural. But do not let your circumstances also dictate your professional identity, and in turn, shape your career narrative.
For instance, you may be a high-school drop out working menial jobs to pay the bills. But, that doesn’t mean you have to take on the professional identity of “a high school dropout who works menial jobs”. Don’t let others or circumstances decide your professional identity.
Or to put it more bluntly: don’t let others tell your story the way they want to tell it. Tell your story the way you want it told.
Challenge Current Circumstances
Think of it like this: What if you are a barista today? Does that mean you aren’t a CEO inside or have the makings of one? Does being a barista today disqualify you from having a high-value career?
The answer depends on your aspirations.
If you are content with working as a barista and feel fulfilled, then you are doing what you want, and there is nothing more to discuss.
If, however, you have high aspirations, do not let your survival job define you. Work as a barista, but also work to get society to buy into you as a CEO – or whatever career you aspire to have.
Embrace Your Future While Accepting Your Present
Achieving your professional goals requires a delicate balance. You need to do two seemingly contradictory things at once.
On one hand, you must see yourself, feel about yourself, and present yourself as the CEO you aspire to be. You must be able to craft a compelling career narrative that is built upon the professional identity of a successful CEO.
On the other hand, you must also acknowledge your current reality without getting emotional or discouraged. You must recognize that you are not a CEO yet but a barista with the potential and ambition to become one.
This honest self-assessment allows you to take practical steps towards your goal.
If you don’t approach this problem with this level of honesty, you’ll either end up deluding yourself by playing make believe CEO all your life, or you’ll give up.
Developing Essential Skills
Most importantly, to get society to buy into your professional identity, you also need two types of skills: job skills and career skills.
Job skills enable you to perform the job you want, while career skills enable you to obtain the job you desire.
You can learn job skills through university education, on-the-job experience, or both. Career skills, however, are best learned from real-world professionals who have attained multiple high-value roles. (Hint: in some of our courses, we specifically teach these crucial career skills.)
Learn from us or learn from others. Both are fine. But, ultimately, if you want to have the professional identity that you desire and be proud of, you need to develop both the necessary job skills and the key career skills.
If you don’t, society will likely put you in your place. But if you do develop these skills, you get to pick the role you want to play. It’s a more fun, fulfilling, and lucrative path.
Conclusion
Your career narrative and professional identity are powerful tools.
But keep in mind they are only means to an end and not the end itself..
They are tools using which you can negotiate your professional identity with society, so that you can achieve the career you desire.
Refuse to be confined by your current circumstances and continuously develop the necessary skills to reach your professional goals.
Once you learn how to get others to buy into your career narrative… You can be whatever you want to.