The past forty years have seen tremendous change in Irish higher education.   A perceived need to increase the numbers of qualified professionals available to the economy led to the creation, in 1970, of a binary higher education system through the establishment of a number of Regional Technical Colleges (RTCs).  The mission of the RTCs was to complement the courses on offer at the existing universities by providing applied vocational education in areas such as Business, Engineering and Science.  This paper presents data from a research study which explored the dynamic formation of academic professional identities in the IoT sector and investigated whether and how such identities had been transformed by changes which have occurred at both national and local levels over the lifetime of sector.  Life history interviews were undertaken with sixteen academics with differing lengths of service in one Institute of Technology, with a view to understanding how policy translates at the personal level of individual academic lives and to revealing how structures and agency interact and impact on professional identity formation in a specific context.