Sarabeth berk | Hybrid Professional Personal Branding Photography

Dr. Sarabeth Berk is the leading expert on hybrid professional identity, and a hybrid professional herself. She was featured in Forbes, and is a TEDx speaker, author of More Than My Title, and recipient of a Colorado Inno on Fire award for her innovative work.

Her hybrid title is Creative Disruptor because she works at the intersection of being an artist, researcher, educator, and designer. She grew up in the mountains of Colorado, is an avid skier (and former ski instructor), and even taught art education in The Bahamas before finding her way to this work.

What does your company do?  What do you do, specialize in or excel at?  What makes your service or product special?

More Than My Title is a platform and a movement that fundamentally reshapes how we think about the workforce by expanding the concept of professional identity from “either-or” (experts and generalists) to “both/and” (hybrid). MTMT accomplishes this by empowering workers to clarify and communicate the intersectionality between their multiple work identities, which is where their unique hybrid expertise is formed. MTMT also serves business leaders, talent managers, and career development coaches by giving them tools to engage and retain hybrid workers. 

MTMT’s innovative and disruptive approach is the result of combining theory and practice from the fields of career development, personal branding, and professional identity research and includes  a proprietary process developed by Dr. Sarabeth Berk through her dissertation work.

What inspired you to create your business and how do you motivate yourself when things become difficult?

More Than My Title, grew out of my own professional identity crisis. For years, I felt stuck and pigeonholed in my career path, and I didn’t know who I was. I went back to school to get my doctorate, thinking a credential would be the answer, but I found myself more lost and confused about who I was than ever before.

This is when I started researching professional identity and interviewing people from diverse industries about how they were more than their job titles. 

My “aha” moment was listening to worker after worker tell me, “I wear a lot of hats,” but what they really meant was, “I’m the sum of all the hats I wear!” That’s when I realized workers can be hybrids, the combination of all their work identities, instead of only experts, generalists, or jacks-of-all-trades.