Professional Aspirations in Students with Technical Talent

Abstract

Even if the subject of career and professional aspirations of gifted persons enjoys the interest of many researchers, the age for investigation at which most stop is just before the onset of higher education. In the research that we perform, we aim to investigate the occupational aspirations of talented people who have gone beyond their teenage years and are on the verge of materializing a choice of the technical professions. In achieving this goal, we assume that the individual objectives as vectors of professional aspirations differ between students with technical talent and students who were not identified with technical talent. A number of 437 students on Technical University of Iasi, Romania, participated in our investigation, among them a number of 66 students were identified as talented in technical domain (we used a grid of analysis obtained by intersecting subjects’ results in the instrument of self-nomination technical talent, with their academic results). Professional aspirations were measured using The Career Aspiration Scale - CAS. Our investigations confirm what the literature claims - a significantly higher level of aspirations to students with technical talent compared to those without identified technical talent. Moreover, students with technical talent have professional aspirations related to: lifelong learning, the desire to continue their studies after completing the current level, participation in various training courses. The highest scores were obtained in items 7, 8 and 9 of CAS and it gives us a first look at the reasons for the professional aspirations of students with technical talent - the tendency to obtain expertise through professional training.