Mistakes and recommendations in choosing a profession:
- There is no need to strongly identify professions with school subjects. You may not like school computer science, but you may like being a programmer.
- A profession is not always what it seems. Study each choice as deeply as you can.
- Consider, first of all, your abilities and interests. This is the main thing.
- The prestige and profitability of the profession is not the main thing.
- There is no need to make a choice “for the company.” Just as you shouldn’t choose in spite of or to spite anyone.
Professional self-determination is a complex and lengthy process. Increasingly, professional self-determination does not end with the choice of one profession and a person periodically makes a new choice. You need to try your strengths and capabilities in several areas of activity. Especially in the modern economy, when new technologies change market sectors, and professions can become outdated and change significantly every 10–20 years, forcing a person to learn and retrain throughout his life, mastering new professions throughout his life.
Content
Introduction
. The subject of professional self-determination and the main stages of its development
. Main factors of professional self-determination
. Socio-psychological and professional “spaces” of personality self-determination
. Main mistakes and prejudices when planning a career
Conclusion
List of used literature
Introduction
The concept of “self-determination” is fully correlated with such concepts as “self-actualization”, “self-realization”, “self-realization”, “self-transcendence”. Moreover, self-realization, self-actualization, etc. are often associated with labor activity, with work, namely, with finding meaning in one’s work.
The essence of professional self-determination can be defined as the search and finding of personal meaning in the chosen, mastered and already performed work activity, as well as the finding of meaning in the process of self-determination itself.
At the same time, the paradox of self-determination is immediately revealed (as is the paradox of happiness): the found meaning immediately devalues life (a kind of emptiness is formed). Therefore, the process of searching for meaning is no less important, where individual (already found) meanings are only intermediate stages of the process (the process itself becomes the main meaning - this is life, life as a process, and not as some kind of achievement).
With a more creative approach to one’s life, the meaning itself is created anew by a person. It is in this case that a person turns into a true subject of self-determination, and does not simply act as a conductor of some “higher” meanings.
One of the most difficult (and at the same time creative) problems is the search for meaning for a specific self-determined client. But there cannot be a single meaning (the same for everyone). The only exceptions are eras of wars and moral trials, when the people or certain sections of society are united by a single idea.
self-determination personality career planning
1. The subject of professional self-determination and the main stages of its development
The most famous in Russia is the periodization of human development as a subject of labor by E.A. Klimova (1996):
) the pre-game stage (from birth to 3 years), when the functions of perception, movement, speech, the simplest rules of behavior and moral assessments are mastered, which become the basis for further development and introduction of a person to work;
) stage of play (from 3 to 6-8 years), when the “basic meanings” of human activity are mastered, as well as familiarity with specific professions (playing driver, doctor, salesman, teacher), which is the most important condition for future socialization .
D. B. Elkonin, following G. V. Plekhanov, wrote that “game is the child of labor,” and children’s role-playing game itself arose when the child could no longer directly master the work of adults, when the historical division and complexity of labor.
In the modern world, there is increasingly a situation where children in their games reproduce the activities of adults less and less. This is probably due to the growing complexity of the world of adults, when the direct relationship between the quality and social usefulness of labor, on the one hand, and the standard of living of workers, on the other hand, is lost, when even money (in the form of wages) often does not reflect the labor invested in it;
) stage of mastering educational activities (from 6-8 to 11-12 years), when the functions of self-control, self-analysis, the ability to plan one’s activities, etc. intensively develop. It is especially important that the child independently plans his time when doing homework, overcoming his desire to take a walk and relax after school;
) stage of “option” (from Latin optatio - desire, choice) (from 11 - 12 to 14-18 years). This is the stage of preparation for life, for work, conscious and responsible planning and choice of a professional path; Accordingly, a person in a situation of professional self-determination is called an optant. The paradox of this stage lies in the fact that an adult, for example, an unemployed person, may well find himself in the situation of an optant; as E. A. Klimov himself notes, option is an indication not so much of age as of the situation of choosing a profession;
) the adept stage is the professional training that most school graduates undergo;
) adapter stage - entry into the profession after completion of vocational training, lasting from several months to 2 - 3 years;
) the internal stage is entering the profession as a full-fledged colleague, capable of stably working at a normal level. This is the stage about which E.A. Klimov says that colleagues perceive an employee as “one of their own,” i.e. the employee has already entered the professional community as a full-fledged member (“inter-” means: entered “inside”, became “one of our own”);
) the stage of the master, when one can say about the worker: “the best” among the “normal” ones, among the “good” ones, i.e. the employee stands out noticeably from the general background;
) the authority stage means that the worker has become “the best among the masters.” Naturally, not every employee can boast of this;
) the mentor stage is the highest level of work of any specialist. This stage is interesting because the employee is not just an excellent specialist in his field, but turns into a Teacher, capable of passing on his best experience to his students and embodying in them a part of his soul (the best part of the soul).
Thus, the highest level of development of any specialist is the pedagogical level. It is pedagogy and education that are the core of human culture, since they ensure the continuity and preservation of the best experience of humanity. A professional who has become a Mentor or Teacher is the highest level of professional development.
. Main factors of professional self-determination
E. A. Klimov offers an interesting model - “an octagon of the main factors for choosing a profession”, which characterize the situation of professional self-determination and determine the very quality of a teenager’s professional plans:
) taking into account one’s inclinations (compared to interests, inclinations are more stable);
) taking into account abilities, external and internal capabilities;
) taking into account the prestige of the chosen profession;
) taking into account awareness of it;
) taking into account the position of parents;
) taking into account the position of classmates, friends and peers;
) taking into account the needs of production (“market”);
) the presence of a specific program of action for choosing and achieving professional goals - with a personal professional perspective (PPP). The LPP is considered successful when it is built taking into account all the listed factors.
When working with schoolchildren, the factors for choosing a profession are indicated in the form of an octagon, and when assessing (or self-assessing) the situation of professional choice, lines indicate connections between the LPP and certain factors (for example, if the LPP is constructed without taking into account this factor, then the line is not drawn).
In this form, the “octagon of main choice factors” clearly reflects the characteristics of the teenager being consulted and allows him to clarify his career guidance problems.
. Socio-psychological and professional “spaces” of personality self-determination
The most popular typology of professional and personal self-determination in Russia today was proposed by E.A. Klimov. He identified five spheres of labor based on the principle of human interaction with the primary subject of labor:
) man - nature;
) man - technology;
) man - sign systems;
) person - person;
) a person is an artistic image.
Foreign typologies often highlight similar areas of work. But at the same time, something new is added: for example, such a “type of professional environment” as “entrepreneurial” (in D. Holland), and in earlier typologies - also the spheres of “politics” or “religion” (in E. Spranger) and etc. Analysis of typologies shows that they largely reflect the cultural and historical situation that has developed in a given society.
A career consultant can select the most appropriate typology for the situation, or specifically develop a new typology, or look for some kind of universal typology that is adequate to different cultural and historical situations.
Professional Development Planning Options
To begin with, it is useful to understand how the concepts of “professional choice”, “personal professional plan” and “personal professional prospect” fundamentally differ.
Professional choice is focused on the near future. For example, choosing a specific vocational educational institution. Next, there may be a choice (clarification) of a specialty, department, faculty. During the course of training, other choices may arise: a supervisor, a place of practical training, various special courses, etc. Upon completion, you will choose a place to work.
Thus, the whole career is a series of choices.
Therefore, it cannot be said that an unsuccessful choice of profession will make your whole life unsuccessful. Even a bad choice can be largely corrected by other (subsequent) choices. Although, of course, it is better to make fewer unsuccessful choices.
A professional plan is a clear sequence of actions to achieve specific goals: you can plan a meeting with a professional consultant, etc. A plan often allows you to present complex (at first glance) professional goals in the form of simpler actions (or tasks) that are completely understandable and easy to implement.
The professional perspective is more generalized; it is usually focused on the distant future, and therefore is less specific. A professional perspective is usually more optimistic (the word “prospect” itself contains something good and desirable). It is often on the basis of perspective that various (more specific) plans are developed. In this case, there may be one perspective, but there may be several plans for the implementation of this perspective. And here the problem of choosing the most successful plans arises.
And the basis of professional prospects, and the basis of professional plans, and even professional choices are the value and semantic orientations of a given person. Each time he seems to ask himself the question: will this choice, plan or prospect allow him to achieve the desired lifestyle, to success?
Let's consider the main options for planning professional development.
Target option
A person is more focused on complex and prestigious goals, but takes little into account his real capabilities. Therefore, this option can be called “romantic”. Often such plans are difficult to implement, so career counselors try to reorient clients towards more realistic goals. But sometimes, if the client is a strong personality, complex goals can mobilize him and he quickly expands his capabilities (works on himself) in order to implement even such complex plans. But not everyone succeeds.
Realistic option
A person, on the contrary, does not set difficult goals for himself, but takes more into account his real capabilities and, as it were, selects professional goals to match these capabilities. Usually a person achieves such modest goals, although he often regrets that he did not even try to achieve more interesting and complex goals. Sometimes it happens that a person, having already begun to implement such plans, discovers more interesting opportunities. And then other, more complex choices and plans may appear, i.e. It is quite acceptable to adjust plans.
Event-driven approach
It is based on the interesting idea that all life is a series of interconnected (and mutually determined) events. An event is understood as relatively compact in time, but very important (significant, bright) for a person’s entire life. Often mature or elderly people, recalling their lives, highlight just such vivid events (it is quite difficult to remember a whole life in all its details). Sometimes they even say that if there were no such events in life, then life did not work out. There is an interesting technique where a “life perspective” is built from the events of the past, present and expected future, which is then analyzed together with the client and the most important life events are determined (and sometimes planned).
Scenario approach
It is based on typical life scenarios, based on which many people plan their lives. These scenarios are set by a given culture and are original models by which one can live. The peculiarity of many scenarios is that society approves of most of them, so a person who plans his life according to such models is understandable to others and has much fewer problems than those who plan their life in some unusual, original, creative way. On the one hand, a person does not realize his right to be a subject of self-determination, since he follows ready-made models. But, on the other hand, most people are not ready to be full-fledged subjects of self-determination - this, unfortunately, is a reality associated with insufficient career guidance work. And ready-made scripts often help such people to at least somehow gain self-determination in our complex world. They, however, still have the opportunity to choose the most attractive scenario, i.e. They show at least some subjectivity in self-determination.
Creative option
The basis here is the desire to build an original life, not very similar to anything else. The more original the professional and life plans and their implementation, the more interesting they are for others, and the more reason a person has to be proud of the uniqueness of his life (which means he did not live in vain). The main problem when implementing such a creative approach is that it is little understood by others, and often a creative person is lonely, or even condemned by the majority of those around him. For example, a creative person is not interested in living without worries, without unexpected turns of fate, without internal or external problems that must be overcome, etc. But is this interesting to everyone?
And yet, it is precisely this option that is promoted by many thinkers of the humanistic direction and is even considered as a kind of ideal of self-determination, self-realization, self-actualization, self-transcendence, etc.
For most, such an “ideal” is difficult and unattractive. Therefore, in actual professional consulting work, a psychologist should talk about this option for planning professional development very carefully. However, it is also impossible not to say this.
4. Main mistakes and prejudices when planning a career
E.A. Klimov identifies the following main difficulties and mistakes when choosing a profession.
. Treating the choice of profession as a choice of a permanent island in the world of professions. This gives rise to a feeling of “fatality” of the choice. When a bad choice can ruin your whole life. In fact, all life is constantly alternating elections (according to D. Super). Even K. Marx opposed the “vocation” that assigns a person to a certain labor function and called for a person to constantly master more and more new types of activity in the course of life, since this is what ensures his harmonious development. He even wrote that “the nature of large-scale industry requires a constant movement of labor,” when “every five years a worker will be forced to change his profession,” which is associated with the constant change and development of production itself. K. Marx's predictions were partially confirmed, and in modern enterprises, successful careers are more likely to develop for those who master at least related professions.
. Prejudices of honor, when some professions are considered “shameful”, intended for “second-class” people. This problem is complex, but we must understand that every work is important for society. In the West, increasingly, low-prestige professions such as garbage collectors are paid quite highly, and, conversely, workers in prestigious creative professions do not always receive high salaries. One explanation: creative work itself is already a high reward, and then, if everyone wants to be prestigious creators, then who will clean up the garbage? Regarding garbage, one can also note that culture generally begins with the fact that the produced garbage is not left behind, but removed, or the energy of the garbage is somehow accumulated into a different quality.
. The choice of profession is under the direct or indirect influence of comrades. On the one hand, you should listen to the opinions of friends who know each other well and sometimes give honest and informed advice. But often, focusing on the opinion of his comrades, a teenager makes the same professional choices as they do - this is called a choice “for creative torment,” which is a natural and even happy state for a seeking person) from the inability to understand the specifics of the era in which he he lives himself. Education itself is usually more conservative (and even dogmatic) in nature: pupils and students are more familiar with the conservative part of a given science or a given field of production, while real practice is more focused on solving specific problematic issues. And solving these problematic practical issues involves special difficulties in professional communication with colleagues, managers, customers, clients and other people, which is clearly not talked about enough in school.
. Outdated ideas about the nature of labor in the sphere of material production. E.A. Klimov means that many technical professions previously included a significant element of “manual” and even routine labor, and were also associated with not very favorable conditions (increased pollution, noise, risk of injury, etc.). In many modern enterprises, workers work in much more comfortable (ergonomic) conditions, even the term “blue collar” has appeared, i.e. you can work, if not in white shirts, then quite decently dressed. Indeed, in modern production, more and more technological processes are automated and do not require, as before, large physical and psychophysiological costs.
. Inability to understand, lack of habit of understanding one’s personal qualities (inclinations, abilities, preparedness). Of course, this is not an easy matter, notes E.A. Klimov. But an obvious failure to take into account one’s inclinations and one’s readiness often leads to the fact that the intended goals are not achieved or one has to pay for achievements with one’s health and nerves, which does not fit in with a successful choice that brings satisfaction and happiness to a person.
. Ignorance or underestimation of one’s physical characteristics and shortcomings, which are significant when choosing a profession. Here, too, there may be difficulties in achieving the intended goals and difficulties in the professional activity itself. For example, a job that requires excellent health, endurance, and stress resistance can not only cause nervous breakdowns and mental illness in an unprepared person, but also lead to accidents and disasters that can have very serious consequences for others.
. Ignorance of basic actions, operations and the order of their implementation when solving or thinking about the problem of choosing a profession. And then situations arise when a person wants to choose the right profession, but acts more chaotically than energetically, and then, despite the outward appearance of activity, the result may be unsuccessful. Not only individual advice and consultations from specialists can help here, but ideally, systematic career guidance work. And on the part of a self-determining person, it is important to be active in finding those specialists who could competently help make the right professional and life choice.
To the typical mistakes identified by E.A. Klimov, we can add the following erroneous actions of many self-determining people.
. In search of consultants and advisors, they often turn to commercial psychological centers, where clients (schoolchildren and their parents) are charged fairly high fees. However, high fees do not always correspond to high-quality assistance.
. Excessive trust in psychologists and professional consultants, who, although they try to provide effective assistance, do not always do it successfully either. For example, in the process of paid consulting, a psychologist, in order to somehow justify his high fees, builds a relationship with a client on outright manipulation (charms him and imposes his choices or chats him up with beautiful conversations, or even simply trivially tests him with the help of exotic foreign tests and issues scientifically sound, but poorly substantiated recommendations). You should not be wary of professional consultants (including private practitioners), but, if possible, you should sometimes double-check their recommendations, and most importantly, understand that responsibility for elections lies with the self-determining person himself.
. Inability and unwillingness to think about the prospects for the development of society (and production). Often, elections are made with a focus on today, when professions are in demand that may later turn out to be redundant (according to the laws of the market, when there is too much of something, it loses its value and “market price”) or there will be a need for other professions. The complexity of such forecasts of social and economic development of society is often associated with the fear of taking a realistic look at the situation. Therefore, full self-determination also means overcoming the fear of thinking about the problems of the society in which a person is going to find his place.
Conclusion
The most famous in Russia is the periodization of human development as a subject of labor by E.A. Klimov. He offers an interesting model - “an octagon of the main factors for choosing a profession”, which characterize the situation of professional self-determination and determine the very quality of a teenager’s professional plans: taking into account one’s inclinations (in comparison with interests, inclinations are more stable); taking into account abilities, external and internal capabilities; taking into account the prestige of the chosen profession; taking into account awareness of it; taking into account the position of parents; taking into account the position of classmates, friends and peers; taking into account the needs of production (“market”); the presence of a specific program of action for choosing and achieving professional goals - with a personal professional perspective (PPP). The LPP is considered successful when it is built taking into account all the listed factors.
The most popular typology of professional and personal self-determination in Russia today was proposed by E.A. Klimov. He identified five spheres of labor based on the principle of human interaction with the primary subject of labor: man - nature; man - technology; man - sign systems; person - person; a person is an artistic image.
And the basis of professional prospects, and the basis of professional plans, and even professional choices are the value and semantic orientations of a given person.
E.A. Klimov highlights the main difficulties and mistakes when choosing a profession.
List of used literature
Klimov E. A. Psychology of professional self-determination. - Rostov n/d.: Phoenix, 1996. - P. 356.
Pryazhnikov N. S. Professional self-determination: theory and practice: Textbook. - M.: Publishing House, 2008. - P. 320.
Pryazhnikov N. S. Theory and practice of professional self-determination. - M., 1999. - P. 359.
Pryazhnikov N.S., Pryazhnikova E. Yu. Psychology of labor and human dignity. - M., 2001. - 456.
Chernyavskaya A.P. Psychological counseling on vocational guidance.
- M., 2001. - P. 189. Tags: Professional self-determination of personality Abstract Psychology
Professional self-determination
Definition 2
Self-determination is a personal choice of one’s life position, one’s views and ideas, as well as directions of development that determine methods of self-realization and self-affirmation in specific life conditions and situations.
Professional self-determination is the student’s self-orientation to choose his or her professional path.
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Professional self-determination is associated with the individual’s search for meaning in his or her participation in specific work activities. In addition, the student must understand the meaning of his self-determination, its necessity and significance. The meaning of professional self-determination reflects the significance and necessity of performing specific work operations, i.e. a person determines why he wants to engage in this particular professional activity, what it will bring him.
The meaning of professional self-determination can be represented by the following indicators:
- Getting a fair income.
- Work for yourself, i.e. performing some activity in order to provide for oneself and one’s existence.
- Torment that promotes self-development and self-improvement.
- An intuitive focus on what a specific profession can provide for one’s own self-affirmation, the formation of a sense of significance and importance.
- The desire to occupy a prestigious position, to be exceptional in the professional field.
Professional self-determination is realized at two levels:
- Changing the consciousness of the individual and developing his self-awareness. They are associated with a theoretical reorganization of one's self-development and self-determination.
- Real practical changes in the social position and social status of the individual. they reflect practical achievements in career choices and professional achievements.
Professional self-determination can be achieved through changing the meaning of one’s professional existence and self-realization in the professional field of activity.
In addition, professional self-determination is realized during the completion of some stage of life’s journey and development: studying at school, college, moving to another city/country, changing jobs, career growth.
Figure 1. Stages of professional self-determination. Author24 - online exchange of student work