Thoughts like these are increasingly on the minds of the growing number of mid-career professionals who are at a crossroads, stuck in jobs they’ve lost passion for, but don’t know what they want to do and who they want to be. In the new book, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career, Herminia Ibarra, a Professor of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD, presents a new model for career reinvention that’s geared toward helping those who have invested years of time and effort in building a successful career make the leap to another that they’ll find more fulfilling.  

Ibarra’s approach to career transition goes against conventional wisdom. Career counselors tell us that successful career change happens in a linear process that begins with first knowing what we want to do and then using that knowledge to guide our actions toward the one “right” job. This method just doesn’t work in real life, says Ibarra. There is no one perfect career waiting to be discovered. Instead, there are many possible selves we might become—and finding the one that fits is the result of doing and experimenting—trying on possibilities through a process of trial and error.  

Based on her in-depth research of how people from all professional walks of life make career transitions, Ibarra outlines a three-part process of career change: experimenting with new professional activities, connecting with new social networks, and working and re-working the story we tell ourselves and others about who we are. This model is presented through the engaging stories of thirty-nine men and women who made radical career changes successfully, including a literature professor turned stockbroker, a psychiatrist turned Buddhist monk, and a tech manager turned executive coach. Ibarra distills their common experiences into a set of unconventional strategies that others contemplating a career change can use to their advantage.

Switching careers means much more than changing what we do from 9 to 5; it means redefining our tightly connected personal and professional identities. Working Identity helps us along the crooked journey of finding out what we want to do and who we want to become.