Placement experiences as identity work: crafting fit with professional possibilities

Placement as a form of work-integrated learning is a valued element of undergraduate education. Prior work explores how placement provides a site for developing professional values, skills and competences as well as identifying how students build awareness of professional requirements. Greater focus on how such processes of awareness are realised, negotiated and enacted is still required. This study frames student placement experiences as enabling processes of recursive negotiation between the self and the setting. The empirical contribution is to document and track this with 40 students on accounting placements, interviewed at three points in time (pre-, during, post-placement) exploring their subjective experiences. Findings evidence various trajectories of experience emerging from which a model capturing four distinct forms of fit (personal, reflected, projected, absence of fit) with professional identity is developed. This suggests student placement experiences in all their variations lead to and constitute more than merely technical or academic outcomes. Conceptually framing placement experiences as recursive negotiations between the self and the setting in the professionalisation journey uncovers how professional identity formation processes are constructed and (re)negotiated. As well as providing students with terminology to understand and articulate the multiplicity of possible placement experiences, educators, employers and professional bodies can benefit from the more nuanced possibilities for work-integrated learning that are suggested.