Undergraduate students’ professional identity construction

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Volume Title
School of Business | Master's thesis
Ask about the availability of the thesis by sending email to the Aalto University Learning Centre oppimiskeskus@aalto.fi
Date
2017
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Marketing
Language
en
Pages
80
Series
Abstract
In Finland, it is very common that the first working experiences from the own field of studies are experienced already during the undergraduate studies. That means the students’ professional identity construction is central during that time already. Identities in a work-related context are mainly researched in perspective of people with longer career paths. An existing identity literature lacks the researches of identity construction in the beginning of the career paths. The purpose of this research is to study how the undergraduate students, studying in the fields of engineering and technology at Aalto University, construct their identities and participate in identity work in a work-related context. The focus is in active development of identities and on the identities linked to the professionalism and working life. Also, thesis seeks to understand the students’ evaluation toward working as representatives of the generation of Millennials. Social constructivism works as lens for the whole thesis and that is the reason why identities are researched based on the social identity theory research stream’s perspective. Inductive reasoning works as a base for the whole thesis process and the theoretical background is formulated based on the empirical part of the research. Qualitative research method is chosen as the research method to provide an enough in-depth understanding of the research topic. Narrative research approach of the research defines the concentration of the students’ stories while collecting an empirical data via twelve semi-structured in-depth interviews. My aim was to interpret the students’ identity construction from the stories they shared with me. Based on the narrative analysis principles, I formulated the students’ stories into one storyline format in the analysis part. The storyline consists of the most important time periods that describes the undergraduate students’ active identity construction. The storyline is divided into three parts which are time before the studies, during the studies and life after the graduation. These time periods point out that the current identity construction is not stable but more likely to be consists of life events experienced in the past and possibly experienced in the future. I created the model with four components to structure the research findings of this thesis. The model is called as the SSTS-model and it provides one way to understand identity construction in a work-related context. The first component of the model is social relationships which describes how central other people’s guidance and examples are for the students’ identity work. The next component is situation which means all activities the students are part of and demands balancing, and thus have an impact to the identity construction. The third component is time which describes durability of identity construction. For the students that means lot of short term decisions with the career related issues. The last component is subject which means the knowledge linked to professionalism. The students think about career issues in perspective of substance know-how.
Description
Thesis advisor
Mitronen, Lasse
Lindblom, Arto
Keywords
identity, identity work, professional identity, professionalism, working life, Millennials
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