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This case study, within the context of boundaryless and protean career development frameworks, investigates linguistic profiling and how code-switching is used to mitigate its impact on Black leaders during their careers. The experiences of Black women coaches and the coaching support they offered Black women clients in code-switching, leadership and career advancement are described. The value of leadership coaching when used to navigate these career progression challenges is emphasized.

The study employed a multiple-case study approach of two Black women leadership coaches.

The findings of this study illustrate the understanding of code-switching and the coaching techniques employed by two Black women leadership coaches. Sage focused on educational strategies, offering historical contexts and resources, while Khadijah leaned on empathy-driven methods, using storytelling to evoke reflection. Both coaches emphasized creating safe spaces for open dialog, encouraged clients to reconsider their actions and values regarding code-switching challenges and sought to prompt clients towards authenticity while navigating career spaces effectively.

Additional strategies for coach practitioners include cultivating trust and a safe environment; active listening; challenging biases and assumptions; contextual understanding; empowering authentic self-expression; fostering skill development; challenging stereotypes; promoting autonomy and flexibility and adopting cross-cultural sensitivity, humility and competence. These practical coaching strategies bridge the gap in career development research by demonstrating how race-conscious strategies can promote workplace inclusivity and promulgate career development.

The study underscores the problem of linguistic profiling, the complexity of code-switching and implications for Black women navigating their career journey within professional spaces. It highlights the significance and value of tailored leadership coaching strategies to promote career advancement. This study addresses the gap in career development research related to linguistic profiling avoidance strategies for workplace inclusivity.

First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based model. However, our analysis of the transcripts of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 22 “first-gen” respondents suggests they are actively deft, agentic, self-determining parties to processes of identity construction that are both externally imposed and potentially stigmatizing, as well as exemplars of survivance and determination. We deploy a grounded theory approach to an open-coding process, modeled after the extended case method, while viewing our data through a novel synthesis of the dual theoretical lenses of structural and radical/structural symbolic interactionism and intersectional/standpoint feminist traditions, in order to reveal the complex, unfolding, active strategies students used to make sense of their obstacles, successes, co-created identities, and distinctive institutional encounters. We find that contrary to the dictates of prevailing paradigms, identity-building among first-gens is an incremental and bidirectional process through which students actively perceive and engage existing power structures to persist and even thrive amid incredibly trying, challenging, distressing, and even traumatic circumstances. Our findings suggest that successful institutional interventional strategies designed to serve this functionally unique student population (and particularly those tailored to the COVID-moment) would do well to listen deeply to their voices, consider the secondary consequences of “protectionary” policies as potentially more harmful than helpful, and fundamentally, to reexamine the presumption that such students present just institutional risk and vulnerability, but also present a valuable addition to university environments, due to the unique perspective and broader scale of vision their experiences afford them.