PROFESSIONAL SELF-DEFINITION: PROBLEMS OF THE THEORY AND THE PRACTICE

Abstract

The problem of professional self-determination exists in a person throughout his life. Personality always faces problems requiring her to determine her attitude to professions, sometimes to analyze and reflect their own professional achievements, to decide on the choice of profession or its change, refinement or correction of a career, the resolution of other professionally determined issues.There are many definitions of the concept of «professional self-determination». However, they all contain a few key points. First, professional self-determination is a conscious choice of professional activity, based on the assessment of their own abilities and capabilities, the characteristics of the profession and the requirements for it. Second, the process of professional self-determination is usually associated with the person’s desire for self-development and self-realization. Thirdly, professional self-determination is characterized by an active search for opportunities for own professional self-development.The most actual problem of professional self-determination is at a young age, when school graduates – senior students first choose a profession.Factors of successful professional self-determination are: awareness of what are the professions in the society and what are the requirements for them; knowledge of objective needs in different kinds of work in society; assessment of their qualities and abilities and their correlation with the requirements of the profession etc.In the process of professional self-determination, the personality, guided by a certain professional group of the society, to which he aspires to enter, must reveal his personal qualities and evaluate them, to show a «tendency to a profession».In analyzing the phenomenon of professional self-determination, one should turn to the ideas of F. Herzberg and his colleagues, who in the second half of the 1950s developed a «theory of enrichment of labor». This made it possible to conclude that if a young person realizes that «enriched labor» will provide or, on the contrary, will not enable her to reveal her own professional potential and build a professional career, she will make her choice consciously and not intuitively.Quite often modern graduates of schools come to a situation of professional self-determination without a certain motivation, not realizing the importance of this step, because there is a significant risk of mistaken choice, which can lead to personal frustrations and inhibition of the process of professionalization.In order to study the motives of professional self-determination of young people in October 2016, 784 students of the first year of study at all institutes and faculties of fulltime education at Yaroslav the Wise National Law University were interviewed. The results of the survey made it possible to draw conclusions about the motivational basis for professional self-identification and professional self-determination, the priority sources of information about the future profession and educational institution etc.