Work Integrated Learning and Development of Graduate Identity

Work Integrated Learning (WIL) is increasingly promoted as a tool to encourage skills in graduates that academic study alone may struggle to provide. However the role it can play in influencing graduate identity is often overlooked, as it is seen more narrowly as something which is only useful in leading to employment.
This paper attempts to redress the balance by considering the development of professional identity in graduates by presenting three short vignettes of participants taken from a larger longitudinal study of student experience of WIL. These draw on both self-characterisation sketches, a method for describing the self developed by Kelly (1955/1991), and on interviews which took place with students in both second and final years of study. Findings are discussed and contrasted with both Social Identity Theory and Holmes’s model of emergent graduate identity and illustrate the diversity of effects on identity that may be experienced by students during the course of their studies.