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EXTENDED EDUCATION
AS A FACTOR OF OPTIMIZATION
OF THE SOCIAL-LABOR SPHERE
L. K. Kuzmina
Extended education has been recently perceived both as an important factor of improving professional qualification and having a successful career, and as a factor of successful interaction, increasing one’s human capital, communicative culture, ability to work in a team, and receiving organizational-labor skills. Important prerequisites of the need to receive extended education are fast obsolescence of knowledge, skills, and techniques that are to be updated after certain periods as well as the serious changes in the labor sphere that require appropriate training, educational and professional mobility. Awareness of the significance of lifelong learning is ensured by emergence of new realities in the system of interaction in the field of social-labor relations. The need for extended education has increased since mid-1990 when the previous system of professional development and retraining ceased its existence. The primary period of extended education is related to development of horizontal mobility of the economically active population. Such kinds of educational services as “business” educational, training, coaching, etc. gained momentum. Courses of “nonprofessional” dimension aimed at expansion of the competencies much-in-demand in life and work received the largest development effort.
The market of extended education is directly linked with the labor market as it cannot function without the demand for employees of various professions and specialties on the part of institutions and organizations. This allows inclusion of additional programs into educational structures, these programs increasing both the human capital and the opportunities of showing initiative, fulfilling one’s preferences, stabilizing or raising the status in the system of social-labor relations. Fulfillment of the need to develop professional skills, to gain new competencies allowing more effective use of the personal potential in the labor sphere is limited by the fact that in most cases the courses are chosen by the employer. Although the choice of the programs does not often meet the learners’ needs, the motives for receiving extended education for the sake of updating of knowledge, skills, and competencies often stand high in the structure of the needs.
As shown by value system researches, the prevailing motive for recurrent education is the desire to improve one’s professional level and intellectual and cultural level as well as one’s ranking on the labor market. The motives for selfimprovement and self-development become the leading ones in the value hierarchy and are related to the desire to get profitable employment and a new position at one’s work, i.e. a successful career. At the same time there is a growing interest in raising one’s social status and it is extended education that is considered as an instrument of achieving it. This also involves formation of an individual ready to understand and perform interaction and capable of living successfully in the present society with new ideals and value orientations.
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It is important that the interacting subjects should have an objective idea about the essence of the problems, should be able to determine their role in social-labor relations, their attitude to them and to form a new vision of the problems, to develop a personally significant and validated assessment of the events. Therefore, gaining new knowledge in the field of interaction at personality-based trainings is quite relevant.
Under conditions of the transforming social space, social ties and contacts become incredibly globalized with the increasing volume and forms of information. All this arouses the need for adequate understanding (of the events, factors, other people, oneself, etc.). The quality of perception and understanding depends on the availability of a certain level of knowledge and skills allowing constructive orientation and interaction in accordance with the established social and group norms, requirements and interpersonal specific features and spatial continuum. Communications in the labor and production sphere reflect the real picture of understanding and mutual understanding. The social diagnostics of the communicative processes allows identification of latent mechanisms in communications, problem situations and the social background against which they take place, as well as the purposes and motives of communication. Adequate perception and mutual understanding require certain skills and abilities of the communicator to get out his or her information as well as attention, desire and certain skills in the partner. The ability to comprehend meaning in communication acts is one of the major conditions of interaction: understanding is linked with “assimilation” of the motivational-target structure. Clear awareness of the conceptual characteristics of interactions depends on the level of communicative skills: a high level ensures adequate perception.
It follows from what has been said that the problem of communication of actors in the social-labor space in the conditions of transformation acquires special significance. This becomes increasingly necessary when the issues of collaboration of many employees with a view to its higher efficiency come to the fore. Enterprises can function only in case of full interaction both horizontally and vertically. This ensures the objective need for development of the individual’s characteristics oriented towards mutual understanding and constructive interaction in the social, professional, and moral fields. The links of extended professional education with the labor market should be strengthened through greater specification on the part of employers and adjustment of the training programs. The training programs and courses should contain issues of both training or retraining in particular professions and universal spheres of labor application and development of the human potential in terms of choice.
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translations Bureau
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