Abstract:

The immense growth in the use of social media creates new challenges for professionals regarding the daily conciliation between their private and their work lives. Social media technologies allow individuals to express themselves online while offering unprecedented capabilities for reaching wide audiences and visibility. These communication contexts are inherently open and social in nature, in the sense that they allow individuals to present themselves, articulate a constellation of connections with others, developing relationships and sharing information that creates intimacy and connectedness with the daily lives of many. However as these new channels of self-expression and interaction grow, they call for the development of new competencies, often labelled as e-professionalism that can equip professionals with the capabilities to adequately reconcile their online presence in their personal and professional domains.

E-professionalism competencies are associated with individuals’ expressions and behaviours that become public in online contexts. This includes the publication of photos, videos, group affiliations, posts and other user-generated content that become available to be interpreted as indicators of an individual’s online identity.

Examples of online expressions that might cause tensions in professional life include explicit photos of risky or socially controversial behaviours, extreme comments or any affiliation with online groups associated with some form of a discriminatory or extreme view. Likewise, any online content that holds some type of disrespect towards others, for example targeting segments that can be directly linked to the individual’s job context (e.g. patients in the case of healthcare professionals, students for the case of educators, etc.) might pose conflicts in the alignment between ones’ personal and professional identity and have implications for the employment organization.

This study offers a contribution to the development of knowledge concerning e-professionalism competencies, by investigating and characterizing what are key domains of s social media utilization that are a source of tensions between individual and professional domains. The study offers a relevant and timely contribution, notably concerning the identification of new competencies for young professionals that are in the transition from education contexts to the world of work often need to readjust the nature of their online behaviour. It also offers a useful tool to inform the debate and the policies about the importance of these topics in the education and training of a new generation of professionals, in the digital age.

Keywords:

E-professionalism, competencies, social media.