In this article, we will not talk about what to do and what rules to follow in order for your child to decide on further career guidance. You will also not find practical tips on choosing a life path here. We will try to maximally reveal a number of features that can prevent the teenager from solving this difficult task, but the environment only needs to try to avoid them.
Each of us has to face at least once ...
Perhaps, in the vast majority of cases, each of us does not make any fateful decisions, guided only by independent conclusions. Often, family and close friends and just people who influence our lives and activities in general come to our aid. Therefore, our decisions are based on life experience and the views of the representatives of society around us, whose opinion is not indifferent to us.
It is extremely important for a person making this choice to make an objective analysis of the information received from outside and from here to form his own conclusions. Relatives, in turn, need to convey information in the most correct and convincing form to someone who is in a difficult situation. Especially if this someone is a teenager who determines his future life path.
So, what factors influence the choice of profession? Below we will try to understand this and maximize this topic, which will be useful both for young people at the beginning of an independent life path, and for their parents.
The role of self-regulation in professional self-determination
The basics of choosing a profession are in direct vision of the world around the subject. And this means that the level of mental awareness of a person (in our case, a teenager) plays an important role on this path.
In other words, the child should be able to evaluate their own capabilities and characteristics of personal thinking with the goals that he sets for himself in the future. Such adolescents in modern psychology are awarded the title of "autonomously thinking," because they, like no other, can independently determine their own place in life and, accordingly, in the labor niche.
In order to find out how much a person is able to decide on this most important task, you can conduct a test for the choice of a profession, which with its results will show the level of self-determination of the individual.
Family Influence on Future Specialty
However, often by the age of 16-18 years, the child is not yet able to possess the proper level of self-sufficiency in order to determine his future path in the main activity without any problems. Therefore, the choice of a working profession in many families is based on collective coordination, weighing all the pros and cons. Sometimes this happens explicitly, sometimes only as an indirect effect on the child.
Often parents, without realizing it, impose this or that way of life on the child, and one cannot say that this position of career guidance (choice of profession) is correct from a psychological point of view. Either this is due to their own unrealization, or because this path is a tribal field (dynasties of teachers, doctors, lawyers). In general, the motives for choosing a profession are different. But such an approach leads to the fact that the individual chooses a business not to his liking: he works at an unloved job or, worst of all, has no predisposition to this or that specialty.
The sociological aspect of choosing a life path
What factors influence the choice of a profession if a teenager is not mature enough to make life-changing decisions on his own? That's right, the opinion of peers and friends. Unfortunately, this problem has been frequent for many years (and is by no means modern) - when making an informed choice, a child may not think about what will bring him pleasure, or about what he has a physiological predisposition to.
Quite often, the choice of a working profession is based on a banal unwillingness to part with close friends. For a teenager, graduation from high school is always a psychological trauma to one degree or another. Therefore, if a close friend wants to become a famous doctor and leaves his hometown for further education, your child can go after him only because of an indirect fear of loneliness. An example of this situation is proved by the fact that parents should intervene in the process of professional self-determination of the child, but objectively.
Choosing a profession for students - what to fear
Often, each of us is prevented from living by the so-called myths - established stereotypes, as a rule, that have nothing to do with reality. This is a huge lump of information received, which accumulates over time and does not at all pretend to the role of truth in a particular issue.
Therefore, the motives for choosing a profession are often based on these very myths. It often happens that a teenager (or even his parents, which is many times deplorable) do not have a clear set of data about a particular specialty. As a result, the opinion of the profession can be formed on the basis of their own subjective conclusions. Such conclusions have nothing to do with statistics, so the child goes to study the profession, which, only in the personal opinion of his parents (and no more), is prestigious, more in demand on the labor market and profitable.
Psychological blocks and attitudes
What factors influence the choice of profession? Or rather, which of them interfere with solving this problem as correctly as possible? True - the psychological blocks and attitudes of the teenager, his insecurity in his own abilities, fear of not meeting the expectations of his parents or looking worse than his peers in the eyes of society.
Often this is due to the fact that the child is afraid not to get the right amount of points for admission to the chosen specialty and lose the whole year in vain. Therefore, often children try to choose a backup option, pass exams for that specialty, which is less in demand among applicants. In the near future, this picture looks great - a teenager is studying, there is no lost time. However, if you look at the situation a little deeper, then everything turns out to be much worse — a broken fate, an unloved profession, and a job that does not bring any pleasure.
Therefore, it is better to think twice: is this lost year worth such vast sacrifices?
Personal life and its influence on the choice of a future profession
For modern parents, it’s not news that within the age of 16-18, almost every teenager has his first love, heart feelings, and with them dramas. Alas, now there is so much information for modern youth that, already at such a tender age, many of them think about whether their future profession will stand in the way of striving for perfect family happiness?
The mass of series, Internet resources, literature - all this makes the teenager think about whether his beloved business will allow him to be happy not only at work. And again I want to assure everyone that all these conjectures are just another myth. Doctor to doctor, and lawyer to lawyer. Whether your child will be a workaholic, how much it will give to work - only time can answer this question. Therefore, you should not even think about the interaction of personal life and work when choosing a future profession for a child.
Professor Klimov and his view on solving this problem
Dr. E. A. Klimov has been studying the issue of teenage psychology and labor orientation for many years, so he has his own view on what factors influence the choice of a teenager’s profession.
He deduced a number of driving factors that directly influence the child’s self-determination regarding his future activities.
First of all, the role of the opinion of relatives who are responsible for the future life of the child, both before society and before themselves, plays a role. Therefore, on the ladder of factors, according to Klimov, the first step is occupied by the vision of the parents.
An important role is played by the close circle of the teenager — his friends and comrades, teachers with authority who influence the child’s choice slightly less than older family members.
And only after that are the child’s immediate plans and their own vision of further professional orientation, wishes and pretentiousness to one or another activity. And the last stage of influence is occupied by the abilities of a teenager, his mentality, the ability to engage in a particular profession.
As you can see, from a psychological point of view, the test for choosing a profession in practice is not so popular among applicants. Since few people think at the beginning of their life paths about whether he will like the chosen activity after several decades, whether he will be given work with ease.
And some statistics
In our country, the system of information support for applicants is quite developed, so everyone can contact the institution of their choice and get the necessary summary of facts for a particular specialty. But, as practice shows, from year to year adolescents choose the future path completely spontaneously, not being guided by any kind of career guidance consultations.
As a rule, two-thirds of applicants cannot decide to the last with a choice of specialty, but the rest are deeply convinced of their views, which are often based on the opinions of their elders and those close to them.