Yes / Shaping one's professional identity is a complex process that starts early on in the professional career and is influenced by many factors along the way. An important process in professional identity formation is professional imprinting. In socialization theory, professional imprinting refers to how individuals adjust behavior and beliefs to fulfill expectations from their working environments and achieve a feeling of belonging during sensitive periods. In this study, we turn to the academic setting, which is characterized by high researcher identity heterogeneity and thus can give us insights into the dynamics of professional identity development. Professional imprints during doctoral training lead to permanent characteristics in one's researcher identity. To investigate professional imprinting and its mechanisms, we conducted a qualitative study involving interviews with 16 PhD students and their supervisors (16 professors and 4 post-docs) within the setting of an EU-funded project. We identify the imprinting mechanisms that shape a researcher's identity during a sensitive period. Our study offers valuable insights for managers and policy makers about the role of supervisors or supervising managers in the development of the professional identities of junior colleagues and about the future career trajectories of people entering academia and industry.

Current literature claims that the graduate students’ personal aspects not only influence research training outcomes, but they also serve as a mediator between students’ research activity and research training environment. In previous studies, key predictors of scholarly/research productivity among counseling graduate students have been investigated (Brown, Lent, Ryan, & McPartland, 1996; Kahn, 2001; Kahn & Scott, 1997). However, only 17% of the variance in three factors—research self-efficacy, research interests, and number of years in a program—predicted student research activities directly and research training environment indirectly. Bandura’s social cognitive theory was utilized as the conceptual framework for the study. Data was collected through SurveyMonkey™, an online source that surveyed 292 counseling doctoral students currently enrolled in 90 counseling doctoral programs across the United States. The findings from a factor analysis conducted in the present study indicated, the RIFPQ-R developed by the researcher was a reliable and valid instrument. Additionally, the findings showed that counseling doctoral students’ researcher identity correlated significantly with students’ research activity and research training environment; however, the correlations were weak. Finally, using two multiple regression analyses, students’ research experiences before admission to program, number of credit hours completed in qualitative and quantitative research, number of years enrolled in their program, and weekly hours spent doing research predicted a small portion of variance in students’ reported researcher identity and research activity.