PROFESSIONAL REORIENTATION AND RETRAINING AS AN IMPLICIT RECOURSE FROM THE DEVELOPMENT CRISES OF THE ADULT AGE

Abstract

The article addresses a topical scientific problem of changing the professional activity in the adult age, its theoretical analysis and empirical substantiation are initiated. The agility of the social environment leads to the expansion of the age limits of professional self-realization, repeated pattern, and endlessness of this process. The purpose of the study is to consider the professional reorientation as one of the ways to address the development crises of the adult age. In the course of the theoretical analysis of the problem it has been shown that professional self-determination covers the entire productive period of life. It is proposed to consider professional reorientation in adulthood as a development crisis: the crucial period of the life experience, conditioned by internal contradictions and their subjective interpretation, which causes a significant change in the mode of life and the personality structure. It is a fluctuation point, during which an individual is especially sensitive to opening the alternative ways of self-realization. This period is accompanied by self-identification crises that involve the destruction of the existing I-image, the revision of the interconnections in the system "The World and Me", the construction of a new life scenario. An empirical study of the self-identification processes was conducted in students who were earning their first and second degree. A set of associative techniques measuring the status of personal, professional, and social identity was used. It was found out that premature identity was characteristic of the students who received their first degree: the existing assumptions had a borrowed character, formation of mutual relations in the system "The World and Me" did not go through the crisis stages and independent choice. The diffuse identity is particularly expressed in the professional sphere, which indicates the absence of the established goals and beliefs. The individuals who get a second higher education experience a personal development crisis, the specific feature of which is the transformation of personal and professional identity. Professional reorientation and the beginning of training in a new specialty contributes to the social identification of an adult person who is experiencing a development crisis, while the problems of personal identity become keener. The semantic space of associations is eleborated, which reveal the essence of the self-determination crisis and the ways of addressing it: underachievement, over-evaluation of one’s own capabilities, activity, trial, purpose, competence. Retraining appears to be the gaining of a new experience, a way to perfection, full of trial and error.