How might you describe your hybrid professional identity & unique value?

What’s your hybrid professional identity? How would you describe what you do for work? Is it challenging to describe what you do because you feel you are a unicorn? Do you have a unique value proposition because you have multiple professional identities? 

The work you do could be paid work or it could be something you do as an unpaid volunteer.

If you were going describe yourself, what professional identity would appear on your resume and your LinkedIn profile?

In a previous article, How Multipotentialites Can Share Their Personal Brand on LinkedIn, I shared that to be a mutipotenialite, you are someone who explores many interests. The interests exploration could happen one after another or simultaneously. 

A multipotentialite is different from having a hybrid professional identity. Exploring many interests is not the same thing as what you call yourself in your work. It’s your unique value proposition and helps you to define your personal brand, 

If you are wondering how I discovered this, I give credit to Sarabeth Berk, Ph.D., who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the topic, and then published a book called More Than My Title: The Power of Hybrid Professionals in a Workplace of Experts and Generalists. She also has a workbook and offers courses on her website. 

As explained in her TEDx talk, Sarabeth had an AHA! moment looking at an art book that had surreal images as she was doing her research.  

She found no specific name or title of the image she saw and realized this concept of combining and blending identities could also apply to humans. 

We don’t have to compartmentalize ourselves with a conventional title but can connect our identities together and build relationships between different things. 

You may have a favorite restaurant you go to that has unique names for certain dishes that they developed. Why not invent or reinvent yourself with a new title, and you can be your own new dish? 

Hybridity is where you integrate and mesh together your unique value and it’s the intersection of your different abilities.

After you generate a title of what you want to call yourself, you can develop a value proposition and an elevator pitch to build your brand.

I currently note on my LinkedIn profile that I am a techie boomer cheerleader, but I have also called myself a teacherpreneur more times than I can count. 

Sarabeth notes that hybrids are often called “Connectors, Translators, Barrier crossers, Silo Busters, Boundary spanners, Integrators, Code switchers, or Chameleons.” 

You can highlight your talents as a hybrid professional by bringing multiple identities together. 

So, what will you call yourself? What new creative title will you use in your LinkedIn headline, and will it make an impact?

How do you know if your headline is engaging? You can have up to 220 characters in your headline, so include keywords and your hybrid identity and analyze it with Sharethrough Headline Analyzer. Keep tweaking it until you are satisfied!

Have fun with developing your hybrid identity!