Define your path. Shape your professional identity. Stand out with confidence.
Identity capital refers to the way in which you think about your future career and the types of identities you think are necessary for that professional path. It is about the way you invest in your sense of identity, your future professional self and how this investment can help you to navigate the job market. By developing a sense of identity which you can present to a potential employer and by performing this professional identity well, you can increase your chance of success in the employment field.
“Identity capital is defined here as the level of personal investment a graduate makes towards the development of their future career and employability. This also extends to their abilities to draw on experiences and articulate a personal narrative which aligns to the employment domains they seek to enter. The key here is a graduate’s capacity to develop emerging identities and then warrant and perform this in the early stages of the labour market. Such formation is likely to provide advantages if the personal investment people make toward future work propel them actively towards the labour market.
The self-perception and self-concepts graduates form around future work can therefore provide a frame through which they may be able to channel their experiences and profiles.”
Source: Tomlinson, M. (2017). Forms of graduate capital and their relationship to graduate employability. Education & Training, 59(4), 338–352.
Consider developing your identity capital as a way of building self-understanding and actively shaping your future. This journey unfolds in three connected stages:
Your personal values, motivations, and lived experiences — especially those shaped by language learning and intercultural engagement — which influence how you see your future
Your ability to reflect on these experiences, craft a personal narrative and align your evolving identity with the professional roles to which you aspire
Your confidence in presenting yourself authentically, articulating what drives you and investing meaningfully in career paths that match your developing profile
To activate and demonstrate your identity capital, you can draw on your personal experiences and narratives about who you are and where you come from.
You can also consider how your identity is shaped vis-à-vis external factors (e.g. cultural, social, economic, political, etc.)
You can reflect on how you “perform” your identity in both the public and private spheres.
Finally, you can explore how your sense of identity can “perform” in the labour market and how it can help you target the correct career path.
Think:
The value of identity capital through language ability varies depending on your individual language situations.
For you as a person without an additional language, it could mean that your (work) identity is linked solely to your native language. There is also the added danger of limited intercultural awareness. This could result in a smaller scope when it comes to work identity and as a result, a potentially diminished professional profile.
For you as a person learning languages, you are in the process of expanding your identity by increasing your intercultural awareness as well as your sense of self. This heightened awareness may mean greater possibilities in terms of developing and establishing a work identity/a sense of self in the professional sphere.
For you as a person where more than one language is the norm, then you can adopt multiple (professional) identities or the possibility of shape shifting/code switching to adapt to a workplace. So, knowledge of multiple languages could result in a better ability to adapt to a variety of workplace cultures and professional environments, which could result in increased access to new career paths.
Let us move to the next layer. Language learning develops a wide range of specific and transferable skills that strengthen your identity capital. These include
Some key transferable skills which you are already developing include
Every language you learn helps you become more about who you are — and who you might become. Learning a language is learning to see yourself — and your future — through a new lens.
Professionally speaking, language learning opens the door to careers which prioritize cognitive skills and multilingualism like
Ultimately, bilingual and multilingual students may have a heightened and more complex sense of identity, which can result in expanded opportunities on the job market.
Your university and your career service play a key role in supporting you to build and activate your identity capital. Good practice includes offering reflective career learning workshops, create guided identity and career storytelling activities, connect language learning with career exploration, mentoring and peer support schemes, design internships and mobility experiences as identity-building, promote personal branding and online presence development and so on. This will help you see the link between academic work and personal/professional development.
