Career And Identity

I used to really struggle with my identity in my early 20s. I’ve read that males associate their identity with their career more strongly than females, and for me this is certainly true.

At the first Web Directions conference I attended in 2005, Molly Holzchlag highlighted in her presentation the various different roles that exist for people working on the Web – designer, developer, information architect, copywriter, usability specialist, site manager, content producer… the list is endless, and her point resonated with me — that we are all striving to find “our place on the Web”. At the time I was working for one of the largest technology-based companies in the world, and yet I was performing none of these roles. I was working as a “consultant”, and had difficulty explaining what that was to people, largely because it kept changing under my feet. When I went looking for my first job, this variety is what I was after. But now that I knew I wanted to work on the Web, it was growing tired.

It’s not that I have ever been uncomfortable with who I am. I knew from a very early age what I valued in life, where I stood on certain political matters, what I was good at (and what I was not) and what I was interested in. But this spectrum of topics always seemed so varied, and my interests so diverse, that eventually I began to feel like a “jack of all trades but master of none”. And I equated being a master of nothing with having a lack of identity.

My education taught me how to think methodically, and it taught me how to drink methodically, too. In hindsight, though, it didn’t really teach me how to learn, which is the one thing I would have expected to come away with (I achieved this later in life by reading blogs and a few key books). The school of engineering at the University of Adelaide at the time was very rigid, promoting memorisation and placing a high percentage of a subject’s final grade on one’s ability to regurgitate numbers and formulae on exam day.

So during my studies, the various creative activities that I was engaged in dropped off, one by one — drawing, writing, playing music (although I began listening to a lot more). Later on, in my mid 20s, I felt compelled to liberate this suppressed creativity, and consequently began to struggle pinpointing those characteristics that I defined myself by. I was reluctant to call myself a “software developer”, because I felt it did injustice to my creative skills. But I wasn’t about to proclaim myself as an “artist” when I had no portfolio, no exhibitions, and a rusty set of drawing skills which had been ignored for far too long. To address this I started a creativity web site called opinios, and let it all out there, although I’ve since ceased updating the site.

Anyway, this has been somewhat of a verbose brain dump, but my point is that these days I feel much more comfortable about my identity, and a lot of that has to do with my job. Of course every job has its rewards and its challenges, and I may not work in this role for ever. But at the moment it’s certainly a position in which I feel well utilised, and that’s as good an indicator for identifying oneself as any.

posted: 08.04. 2007, 00:07 (2)