Professional identity is conceptualized as the perception of inclusion in a certain social group that shares a specific domain of technical and work-related knowledge (Gondim, Bendassolli, & Peixoto, 2016; Tajfel, 1983). It is also defined as a cognitive and dynamic process that occurs through narratives actively constructed through social interaction (Guichard, 2009; Savickas, 2013). Thus, professional identity is in a constant construction process and, during undergraduate studies, this process receives greater emphasis due to the various stimuli to which students are exposed. For instance, it is common to have questions, such as: Do I feel close to my future colleagues in terms of worldview, attitudes, tastes, and interests? What types of work environments would suit me? Which subfields of my profession do I identify with most? (Guichard, 2018).
In higher education, three aspects can be listed for the construction of professional identity. Firstly, by recognizing themselves as professionals, the students begin to develop knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values that are similar to those of other members of the profession. Secondly, in doing so, they become different from those who are not part of a certain field. And thirdly, they identify themselves as members of the category of people in that profession (Trede, Macklin, & Bridges, 2012).
Thus, undergraduate students are always in the tension between identification with a certain group that shares the same theoretical and practical domain and opposition to or distancing from other professional groups (Gondim et al., 2016). In the wake of studies on professional identity in higher education, systematic literature reviews suggest a research agenda on the meaning of the construct from the perspective of this target audience (Trede et al., 2012; Vozniak, Mesquita, & Batista, 2016).
In this context, the development of professional identity is understood as a dynamic process dependent on self-perception and interpersonal and cultural relations, therefore presenting a congruence with the Archway Model proposed by Super (1980, 1990), which summarizes career development and its influences by biological, psychological, and socioeconomic determinants. This analogy is represented literally by an arch, which considers different roles and life stages. Its support base is divided into two dimensions: (i) biographical dimension, which is about the importance of personality for career choices and synthesized by accomplishments, and (ii) geographic dimension, which reflects the influence that social policy has on career development through practices at work.
The model also encompasses the stages of development established by Super (1990), in which the left pillar of the arch represents the personal-biographical dimension, such as needs, values, interests, intelligence, and special skills, and is associated with childhood and adolescence. The right pillar of the arch, in turn, represents the social-geographic dimension, such as economic resources, economy, job market, family, school, community, and peer groups, and is related to adulthood and maturity. Each stage requires tasks that vary by age and social expectations, which will be performed in different roles.
The two pillars of the arch interact mutually through individual and social aspects, having the self as a link (Super, 1990). At this junction, professional identity is constructed, which is composed of people’s view of themselves and their identification with environmental aspects. In this sense, professional identity has a social component, as people do not construct this identity with subjective elements only, but also with the various social and contextual inputs they receive. In this logic, the self would be responsible for establishing the self-concept in professional terms, which is constituted in the subjective perspective and evokes the meanings of each person’s values, interests, and capabilities (Alfonso et al., 2020; Guichard, 2009; Oliveira, Melo-Silva, Taveira, & Postigo, 2019).
Therefore, it is the self that allows us to understand that people would have different images of their professional identity, even if they are in the same environment and exposed to the same types of stimulus. In the case of undergraduate students, professional identity is under construction. It arises from the interaction between an individual’s skills and social learning, the latter deriving from experiences developed during undergraduate studies and possible work experiences.
Different studies point to the effects of practical experiences inside and beyond higher education institutions (HEIs) for the construction of professional identity and evidence work experiences in one’s field of training (Hunter, Laursen, & Seymour, 2007; Trede et al., 2012). Meanwhile, learning opportunities that take place outside classrooms bring benefits to students (Mourão, Carvalho, & Monteiro, 2020).
This view of learning from experience is anchored in Kolb’s Theory of Experiential Learning (1984), which considers a cyclical process comprising four modes of learning: by thinking (conceptualization), by doing (active experimentation), by experimenting (concrete experience), and by reflecting on what has been seen and heard (reflective observation). Applying that theory to the construction of professional identity among undergraduate students, it would be assumed that this process of acquisition of knowledge, attitudes, and competencies would be continuous throughout training (Mourão et al., 2020). Having the possibility of articulating theory with practice allows these individuals to identify themselves more as professionals than as students and increases their identification with a certain workgroup (Oliveira et al., 2019).
Thus, there is a greater gain for students when the experiences in the workplace have a connection between what is taught at the university and the work activities carried out (Hunter et al., 2007). The contribution of work experience within the field of the course to the development of professional identity may be even greater than the contribution given by the university itself (West & Chur-Hansen, 2004). On the one hand, the intersection between university and work is integrated into the individual and relational perspectives of work-related learning (Weerdt, Bouwen, Corthouts, & Martens, 2006). On the other hand, it is worth questioning whether work experiences related to self-support and beyond one’s field of training would contribute to the construction of professional identity.
Work experiences during college, without a direct connection with one’s field of training, are approached in the literature from two perspectives. The first is that of gain of general competencies resulting from experiences in the world of work (Mourão et al., 2020). The second perspective is that the time spent on work activities competes with the dedication to higher education, making the training process more exhausting and reducing an individual’s possibility of taking advantage of opportunities provided by their undergraduate course (Fior & Mercuri, 2018; Silva & Teixeira, 2013). In this vein, even when it comes to working in one’s field of training, the time spent on work activities may compromise the quality of college training (Maier & Mattos, 2016).
Thus, studies in the area discuss whether work experience during the undergraduate period contributes to or harms students’ development. On the one hand, they can facilitate the development of practical skills and the transition to the labor market. On the other hand, work is not always related to experiences that allow the students to initiate contact with their area of work. Many students work out of the need to guarantee their livelihood and need to divide their time between studies and working hours, which can compromise their school performance (Maier & Mattos, 2016).
Considering this discussion of work experiences in the literature, we decided to research professional identity in three groups of students: undergraduate students who do not work, undergraduate students working in a field related to their course, undergraduate students working in a field not related to their course. These groups were chosen because the experiences in a field related to one’s training contribute to the construction of professional identity (Gondim et al., 2016; Silva & Teixeira, 2013).
A means to assess whether undergraduate students’ work experiences affect the meanings attributed to professional identity is by analyzing semantic networks. This analysis is inserted in the scientific paradigm of social-network analysis and allows assessing how meanings are constructed through patterns of connection between words (Pereira, Fadigas, Monteiro, Cordeiro, & Moret, 2016). Based on the mathematical theory of graphs, semantic networks have contributed to studies on cognitive processes, by making it possible to identify patterns of meaning in complex phenomena (Freeman, 2011).
The assumption of this type of analysis in the attribution of meanings regarding professional identity is that language provides the necessary words for people’s reflective processes concerning this study object. Thus, we work with the hypothesis that the concrete experiences of undergraduate students, whether enabled by personal or contextual pillars, are inputs for the co-construction of the self, which also spans the interpersonal relationships that attribute meaning to experiences (Froidevaux, 2018).
A reflection on professional identity leads us to think about our actions, who we want to be and what work we want to do, from the perspective that professional identity is socially built, culturally shaped, and linguistically narrated (Guichard, 2016). In this study, we used, within the framework of semantic networks, the analysis of critical networks, which highlights only the most relevant associations of the research phenomenon, with possibilities for reflection on cognitive-behavioral differences between individuals (Lima-Neto, Cunha, & Pereira, 2018).
The network analysis comes from an interdisciplinary field that studies the relationships between actors, forces, directions, and the contents of these relationships, as well as the macrostructure such interactions generate. Its peculiarity and richness are in prioritizing the relationship between actors or vertices as an analytical unit of a phenomenon (Borgatti & Lopez-Kidwell, 2011; Freeman, 2011), considering an analysis of clique networks. A clique is a set of mutually connected n vertices, in such a way that the basic element of a clique network is not the vertex but the clique (Fadigas & Pereira, 2013; Grilo et al., 2017).
A semantic clique network is a system to represent the knowledge established by a specific context and imbued with intention of functionality, in which vertices are words or concepts with meaning, the smallest unit of meaning is the sentence (for instance, a set of words uttered by an individual), and edges connect two words belonging to the same sentence (Cunha, Santos, Moret, & Pereira, 2020; Nascimento et al., 2018). Several authors have used this model, for instance, in oral discourse (Lima-Neto et al., 2018; Teixeira et al., 2010), in semantic networks of titles of scientific articles and course descriptions (Andrade, Barreto, Cunha, Ribeiro, & Pereira, 2019; Pereira et al., 2016), as well as in networks of uttered words (Lopes et al., 2015).
Thus, we adopt as an assumption the perception of language as a central mechanism to construct and constitute subjective social realities (Guichard, 2016), which can be interpreted from the analysis of semantic networks (Freeman, 2011). In the light of the foregoing, this study aims to assess, by analyzing semantic networks, the role of work experiences in the meanings that undergraduate students attribute to professional identity. The next section details the method defined for the study.