Constructing Professional Identity - the Experience of Work Based Learning Candidates

Previous research into professional identity has argued that training institutions shape professional formation. This research focuses on professionals who have undertaken a work based approach and explores the interrelationship between practitioners’ own narrative of professional identity and that encoded within the narrative of the standards of a professional HR/HRD body. The findings begin to question the traditional understanding of the inter-relationship between the narrative of the professional body and individual HR/HRD practitioner narratives of identity suggesting that neither the professional body nor the mainstream educational institution are the major players in the development of professional identity.