Develops over time

That professional identity develops for an individual over a period of time is made clear within the literature. Robinson and Tanchuk et al. (2012) interviewed students and experienced faculty members. Although their study was specifically about professionalism rather than professional identity, they define professionalism as the behaviour that comes from the components of professional identity (they list knowledge, skills and attitudes as part of this). In this study P4 relates professionalism to identity and recognises the developmental aspect of this stating that:

“it (professionalism) becomes part of your identity more so than anything”

Robinson and Tanchuk et al. (2012) find that students only have a rudimentary understanding of these concepts and that over time this develops until the experienced staff use phrases such as ‘professionalism being like a marriage contract’, ‘something that you can’t turn off’ or ‘something that is a piece of you’, this is opposed to students that debate the need to be professional at different times. This shift in thinking shows the clear development of professionalism as a concept and its internalisation or assimilation into personal identity. Cook and Gilmer et al. (2003), quoted in Sims (2011), describe professional identity of nurses as being a developmental process that evolves throughout a professional career. Cook and Gilmer et al. (2003) do note that students have limited understanding of professional identity prior to being a student and this is an issue that I shall return to later in this chapter.

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This process of development is one that is clear within the data from the participants. There is specific acknowledgement that you do not come out of university with a clear concept of a professional identity, and sometimes not even fully prepared for the world of work (P3 and P7). There is as well very clear evidence that the participants in some cases had not yet reached the stage described by Robinson and Tanchuk et al. (2012). More than one participant described having a different work and personal identity (P4 and P6). It is P7 that captures the feeling of ongoing development when he expresses:

“it’s about identity and initially feeling yeah I'm an OT, and then realising learning is gonna be forever”

There were numerous references made to still maintaining parts of a student identity (by all participants but P7).This leads to a need to acknowledge here that as the identity of ‘occupational therapist’ grows and gets stronger, so must the identity of ‘student’, in turn get weaker. This cross over between these two identities is supported within the data under the specific code ‘Uni-mode’. This code related to the times where the participants did things (normally working at home) that they felt was still like being a student. The fact that they identified it as a separate way of being indicates that this is beginning to no longer be part of normal life and that this identity is beginning to fade. Therefore although the concept of identity developing over time is one that is recognised in the data, it is not something that can happen entirely within the preceptorship year. The preceptorship year can help this development but only as part of that larger continuum of development already discussed and presented in figure four.

6.3.7 Continuing professional development.

I have already noted that P7 made a comment about learning being forever, and the concept of continuing professional development (CPD) is a formal recognition of that. The issue of training and CPD is linked to that of knowledge, as it is in effect, the upkeep of professional knowledge and as such a responsibility of the profession, and individual professional (Beck, Young 2005). Continuing professional development also reflects the fact that identity is an active process and that individuals need to work at establishing an identity (Jenkins 2014), which is a concept shared by Giddens (1991) when he claims that identity should not be passive. Participants in the interviews described a number of

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learning and training opportunities, most of which were profession specific, such as Allen’s and MOCA training (Allen, 2000, Sherwood et al. 2015). This process of training can be seen as a parallel to the process of becoming (Martin, Gutman et al. 1998, Wilcock 1999, Jenkins 2014).

It was P5 who was most vocal about CPD, feeling that it was much more important than preceptorship. She had viewed preceptorship as generally a repetition of university placements and felt she was being asked to prove herself unnecessarily. However, she did value training and CPD in general as a way of developing skills and knowledge and of keeping up to date with new research and evidence. She talks about needing to make time for this development and so recognises that it is an active process. Her concerns being that if you do not make time to develop you could end up:

“doing what you were doing, when you first qualified 20 years down the line, and you’ve never looked at anything else”

P5 also talks about the busy working day and not having time to “stop and think”. She does not make a link between this statement of how working life is for her now (three years after preceptorship) and the time given over to the preceptorship process in that initial year.

There is also one other consideration worth making before I move on to think about preceptorship. That is, given that we have created a working model of professional identity, is that identity positive?