‘Do you know the impostor syndrome?’ Professional identity among early-career social workers

Despite the growing interest in the experience of early-career social workers, the literature on the formation of their professional identity in the transition to workplace is limited. The aim of the present qualitative research is to explore how social workers perceive the formation of their professional identity in their first years of practice and what the significance of their professional identity as social workers is in their overall early-career experience. Two focus groups were conducted online with eleven Israeli graduates. The findings indicated that forming a professional identity was central to the participants’ experience in their first years of their practice, and was described as a complex, ambivalent, and even contradictory process. They used the term ‘impostor syndrome’ to describe this process. It emerged as a developmental stage—a state of being and a coping mechanism with the discrepancies between the participants’ inner world and the world outside, and between the image of the ideal professional identity and that of the profession in general they had held in mind as students and the one they encountered in their day-to-day field practice. These findings and their implication for social work practice are further discussed.