Maturity of Teenagers’ Occupational Preferences as a Factor in Their Socialization

One of the most acute problems in employment of both the country in general and the region in particular is the structural imbalance caused by the mismatch of professional skills of graduates of educational institutions with labor market requirements. The reason for this process is often an inefficiently structured vocational guidance and lack of close interaction between potential employers and the educational system. The authors analyze the degree of maturity of teenagers’ occupational preferences and its impact on timely acceptance of social roles and their skillful performance in accordance with the requirements of the modern innovation-oriented society. The informational base of the study includes data of the 2015 comprehensive survey of children in their mid and late teens enrolled in the Research-Educational Center of ISEDT RAS (8–11 grades). The obtained results suggest that the key issue in terms of occupational self-determination corresponding to teenagers’ personal inclinations is their unawareness about the conditions and basic requirements for the profession; about their own physiological capabilities; the inability to compare their preferences with the real abilities. Thus, the majority of teenagers plan to enter a higher educational institution after graduating from secondary school (82%), they either do not consider secondary or initial vocational education at all, or see it as an intermediate educational stage. In 48% of cases, teenagers choose specialty which does not comply with the type of their occupational preference. Thus, it can be concluded that the system of vocational guidance is currently unable to reach its ultimate goals, namely the formation of adolescents’ intelligent occupational self-determination corresponding to the individual peculiarities of a personality and, at the same time, the society’s demand for staff, and its requirements of a modern employee. To address these issues, the authors propose the changes in two key areas: modernization of the system of school vocational guidance and formation of a unified information space for establishing balance between the demand of young people for certain occupations and their supply in the labor marke