Designing Prospective Professional Identities

This article explores multimodal meaning-making in a small corpus of 47 video curricula, recorded by undergraduate students in a Business English course at the University of Trento. The adopted methodology combines tools derived from genre analysis, multimodal analysis, and narrative analysis. The research question is the following: how do students select and integrate semiotic resources in a video curriculum to design their prospective professional identities? The results show that academic students as job applicants use a range of modes and modal resources (e.g., speech, eye contact, angle, icons, music) to design and communicate their future professional identities and to engage with their potential recruiter. A pervasive and noteworthy technique in the dataset is that of storytelling. Multimodally realized through speech, writing, gestures and other modes, storytelling is used to perform self-narration and to shape prospective professional identities. Hence, the examined multimodal texts show a tension between genre integrity and creativity, that is, between the adoption of standardised guidelines offered by tutorials and lectures, on the one hand, and more innovative and distinctive solutions, on the other hand. Prospective job applicants seem to pay particular attention to post-production elements such as keywords, icons, images, animations and less attention to mise-en-scène aspects including clothing style and setting.