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A PERSON’S PROFESSIONAL POTENTIAL AS A FACTOR OF DEMAND ON CONTINUOUS EDUCATION TO MAINTAIN THE QUALITY OF LIFE
I. Y. Stepanova
Advancement oriented continuous education is an indispensable condition that accompanies a person on the path to lifelong professional growth. A person's comprehension of professional potential allows transforming professional activities into a meaningful component of the quality of life.
Key words: quality of life, continuous education, professional potential, learning-professional task.
In our opinion, it is important to relate implementation of the ideas of continuous development to maintaining sustainability of the social development process as a whole, rather than with achievement of sustainability of certain states. This understanding supposes a focus not just on satisfaction of the needs of the current and future generations, but on their rise when spiritual and intellectual needs and interests gradually become prevailing. To achieve these purposes, a special role is given to education during one’s whole life, when the main purpose and meaning is to build and continuously enrich a person as a free, creative personality making an independent choice and being responsible for his/her acts and their consequences. To do so, we should give a human oriented nature to education, transforming it in a continuous and leading way to provide development of students’ global thinking and the ability to independently obtain and implement knowledge. The practical realization of this concept supposes a search for ways to dramatically transform the mentality of our cotemporaries.
It appears that mentality transformation in the process of obtaining higher education and following professional activities requiring continuous professional advancement can also be related to a person’s professional development through an understanding of his/her professional potential. Indeed, when we make an informed choice of a professional activity, our motivated and socially meaningful work regarded as a value impacts our whole life, and the quality of our life. The category of “potential” belongs to general scientific concepts. Philosophy interprets potential as a source, opportunity, mean, stock, or something that can be used to solve a problem, to achieve a task. The phenomena of potential in acmeology is related to self-expression in one’s profession, and to personal and professional development and improvement of one’s personal potential. Following V.N. Markov, we propose to understand the potential of a person as a sustainable, autonomous system of his (her) internal resources reflected in his (her) professional achievements and prospects. When we systematically distinguish between the resource and potential, we can conclude that potential is a structured resource of a certain power (V. I. Slobodchikov) having a control system and featured by a conscious and unconscious level (V.N. Markov). Professional potential is reduction of the personal and professional potential of a person to only his/her professional activities, and reflects the totality of his/her possibilities and abilities to master the professional activities. This is expressed in such indicators as the performance of professional activities, the level of personal comfort while realizing them, and the intensity of professional activities.
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The structure of professional potential can be internally divided into fulfilled and non-fulfilled potentials. The fulfilled professional potential of a person is determined by his (her) professional experience, and is reflected in the accumulated knowledge, skills, abilities, readiness, and qualities allowing one to provide a certain level of professional activities. Non-realized potential is determined by the target-full, value and motive professional orientation of the person. Understanding one’s professional potential allows a person to reflect on his/her advancement along the line of time in the space of professional activities, linking the past, present and future. This tie can be provided thanks to identification of the area of successfully resolved professional issues and its gradual expansion. The direction of changes in professional potential can be set both from the outside (development of the professional environment, modernization of the objective professional requirements etc.), and from the inside (establishment of internal goals of individual development of a person as a subject of activity, of needs beyond situation activities, etc.). The actual status of the realized professional potential based on the principle of specificity and social conditionalism can be identified based on specific functions, roles, and types of professional activities. Identification of non-fulfilled potential supposes reference to the area of professional intents, purposes, preferences and aspirations. Diagnostic procedures aimed at understanding the actual status of fulfilled and non-fulfilled potential allow the person to detect his (her) nearest and remotest prospects, to understand his (her) competitive advantages, and career building. The experience of practical activities for the organization of such work at higher education institutions allows us to suggest building a process including the following stages: (1) setting and adoption of training and professional goals by students; (2) development of conditions for successful achievement of these goals by joint activities with fellow students, teachers, and practical specialists; (3) analytic and reflective understanding of the person’s advancement and revealed faults for setting new goals. Three lines of activities can be identified in this process.
The first line is related to understanding the value and motive side of the professional potential. This supposes organization of an action related to the generation of senses and motives for training, and professional activity of students, actualization of their values through construction of the image of the future, both the nearest and remotest. Reference to senses considerably contributes to compensating understanding/non-understanding of strategic purposes of education by students (especially at the initial stages). A notable purpose is the creation of conditions for transfer from training motives (acknowledgment, encouragement, censure, award, internal satisfaction, rating, Olympiads, etc.) to senses of a professional nature (to be able to duly perform functions and types of professional activities under the given conditions, match the role position, the image of a professional, to realize oneself as a professional). This effect is achieved due to inclusion of all motivation fictions in the process of stimulation of students taking into account the features of their experiences and perception of time: to aspire to the future is a sense-forming and guiding function; to act in the present is a motivation, cognitive and adoption function; to rely on past experience is a controlling and regulating function.
The second line of action in the process of training is related to developing opportunities for fulfilling knowledge, skills, and student’s capacities under the given conditions of training and professional reality while implementing various
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types and functions of professional activities, professional roles and role positions. To do so, opportunities are developed for students to experience their compliance with the requirements of a professional situation, and a professional’s image. It is suggested to provide compliance of requirements for the profession at the level of common meanings with the requirements for the professional community and the persons’ own beliefs, attitudes and preferences. To do so, a set of training and professional goals is developed, aimed at mastering various types and function of professional activities, at mastering social and professional roles. The invariant component of the complex of professional goals is built based on professional goals for each type of activity according to the level of education (Bachelor’s, Master’s, postgraduate studies etc.), requirements for results as set by the framework of a specific education program, as well based on the functional structuring of the professional activities (professional standard), reflecting a sustainable form of professional requirements for his (her) activities.
The third line of actions within the training process imposes identification of the students’ emotional and reflective attitude toward the realized functions, roles, and types of professional activities impacting the choice made, and the decision to act. Diagnostic activities for identifying resources are performed by both teachers and students on the quality level. To do so, attention is focused during performance of training and professional activities on emerging situations, under which the student needs application of concrete resources, and the performance of his activities is assessed. These activities are enriched from one situation to another. The motto “freedom in exchange of responsibility” is implemented: the more responsibility the student can assume, the more choices are granted.
The suggested activity for fulfillment of students’ professional potential at higher education institutions have been substantiated from the theoretical and methodological point of view, and is realized for training of teachers [3; 4]. As practice shows, such actions make it possible to gradually transfer the responsibility for education to students, contributing to establishment of their own professional individuality, providing informed choice of a job after graduation. It can be supposed that the procedures mentioned above allow bringing a leading nature to the process of training. Using them for advance training make it possible to develop one’s professional potential. As a whole, these activities contribute to actualization of human demands on continuous education to improve one’s quality of life.
Bibliography
1. Марков В. Н. Профессиональный потенциал и зона ближайшего профессионального развития / В.Н. Марков // Акмеологическое исследование потенциала, резервов и ресурсов человека. - М., 2005.
2. Слободчиков В. И. Деятельность как антропологическая категория // Вопросы философии, 2001. - №3. - С. 48-57.
3. Степанова И. Ю. Проектирование практико-ориентированной профессиональной подготовки педагога в вузе: моногр. / И.Ю. Степанова, В.А. Адольф. - Красноярск, 2013. -368 с.
4. Степанова И. Ю. Становление профессионального потенциала педагога в процессе подготовки: Монография / И.Ю. Степанова. - Красноярск: Сибирский федеральный университет, 2012. - 450 с.
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translastions Bureas
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