Age and experience: how they interfere with the choice of profession
Punkt B continues its series of articles on barriers to choice. Our task is to answer the question of what attitudes, peculiarities of age, mechanisms of the psyche make the choice of profession so difficult. This will provide opportunities and resources to overcome these barriers.
In the last article, we identified the first three barriers to choice:
1. Choosing a profession is responsible.
2. “You choose once and for life.”
3. “Work” and “slave” are synonymous words, and work is hard labor.”
Below we will talk about the peculiarities of age, about the lack of information about yourself and the world, about how this creates difficulties with choosing a profession.
Barrier No. 4: “Misunderstanding the tasks of age development and the peculiarities of the age of the person choosing a profession”
There are two age periods when the topic of choosing a profession is most relevant. In general, representatives of these age groups become participants in career guidance programs “Punkt B”. We are talking about 16 and 30 years, with a deviation of ± 4-5 years.
Why these particular periods? The first choice of profession we make in adolescence. And this often happens not by desire, but by necessity. Choosing a profession at the age of 16 is a social requirement, not a need for a teenager.
The challenges of mental development at this age are somewhat different. And the leading activity, the one through which the development of the psyche occurs, is communication with peers. Therefore, it is very important to consider the age of participants when developing programs for choosing a profession.
Career guidance programmes for adolescents:
(Taking into account the data of age psychology)
• Group. They are more effective than individual consultations – a teenager is more willing to choose a profession in the company of his peers than in a conversation with an aunt-psychologist;
• With thematic conversations with “nearly peers”. Teenagers are much better at understanding information when it is delivered by young people. Therefore, we do not invite to participate in the programs of “venerable academics”, “cool uncles”, and invite young and successful experts “in jeans and hoodies”;
• With an emphasis on “you choose not only a profession, but also a future environment and your party”;
• With the participation of "Teacher" - at this age, they come to the profession through a mentor.
Choosing a path is a task that is relevant in 30 years, when the midlife crisis comes. It is not by chance that this age accounts for the peak of additional or new education, the change of career or profession by adults.
It seems that participation in career guidance programs for 30-year-olds is easier than in the case of teenagers. You have an inner need that you just need to get started.
But it is no coincidence that this stage is called the “midlife crisis”. Those who have lived through it know that it is often more difficult to deal with questions like “Who am I?” and “What do I want?” than it is at 16. After all, in 30 years there is a background and a conscious life, which means fears and doubts are many times more. The depth of the problem of thirty-year-olds lies not so much in the plane of “I do not know what to do”, but on the level of “I choose my way – I choose my life”. At this age, individual work with a psychologist is useful and effective.
Barrier 5. There is no experience or understanding of what I love and what can be demanded.
The emergence of this barrier is a consequence of the influence of the school system, where often the child is required simply exemplary behavior and timely execution of instructions. And parents who are more likely to notice that the child does not know than what turns out well.
A good education helps a child answer the three most important questions of career guidance: “What do I love?”, “What do I know?” and “How can I benefit society?” And this is not a story about fives. Exemplary students, excellent students and good students, often rightly note: “In what subjects I have good grades, I know. I don’t know what I really like or know.”
This is one of the biggest problems in our education system. But the issues of systemic changes will be left to the state. Let’s see what we can do in the here and now.