“Demarcational lines” of vocational education

Abstract

In recent years, the attention of researchers, practitioners, and education managers has been significantly focused on the problem of personal educational outcomes. The author of this article, limiting the scope of their research to the level of professional education (including secondary and higher education), substantiates the syncretic nature of the concept of «professionally significant personal qualities» and decomposes it, highlighting, among other things, the professionally significant qualities that reflect the «pre-personal» level of professional education outcomes and the value foundations of professional activity. Taken together, they form the personal component of the results of professional education, which differs from the instrumental component (knowledge, skills, and competencies) in a number of significant ways.The author proposes a new approach to building a predictive typology of the results of professional education, which is based on various ways of working with them. The main types of educational results are as follows: 1) competencies that are effectively formed through the educational process; 2) professionally important qualities, which are a specific set of a person’s hereditary abilities and require professional selection procedures; 3) the value foundations of professional activity, which are worked with by accompanying the process of professional self-determination at the stages of initial professional choice and its subsequent refinement. For the last two types of professional and educational outcomes, the possibilities of the professional education process in their formation are limited; much is decided at the stage of choosing a profession (specialty) and specifying a specialization.The practical conclusion is that work on achieving the planned results of vocational education can and should be carried out not only at the exit, but also at the entrance to the vocational educational process. This means that educational standards (vocational and higher education) should also include requirements for professional orientation procedures in the environment of professional self-determination, which is formed at the stage of general education.