Secondary Professional Training Facilities in the Eyes of Graduates: Working Versus Further Education

This article analyzes institutions which prepare mid-level specialists – primarily the connection between the socio-demographic characteristics of professional training college graduates and their opinions, their outlook on their chosen specialties, their motives for choosing a profession and their future course of life. This article has been prepared based on materials from a sociological study dedicated to such issues as professional attitudes and plans of those who graduated from Russian professional training colleges; said study was conducted in 2014 by an IS RAS research team lead by D. L. Konstantinovskiy. During the study, graduates would explain what caused them to choose their profession and what influenced their choice, they would also share their plans on what they intend to do after completing their education, they would express their opinion on the quality of the education they received, as well as the level necessary for succeeding in life. Based on the acquired data, the vast majority of professional training college graduates (70%) are preparing to enter the labor market. Those who consider pursuing further education full time right after graduating from professional training college – they are relatively few at 16%. Another 2% intend to completely dedicate their time to family life. Less than half of graduates (45%) are confident that they will find a job by their profession. The majority of those surveyed rely primarily on non-institutional resources while searching for a job. Almost two times less people intend to utilize institutional resources. Less than 10% of graduates consider education received at professional training colleges to be sufficient for succeeding in life. The vast majority (over 70%) consider higher education to be essential. The conducted analysis allows us to make the following conclusion: for most professional training college graduates, the secondary professional training system is an intermediate stage in their planned life paths. After graduating from a professional training college, they usually tend to independently search for a job, while not being sure that they would find a job by their specialty. This has to do not only with issues on the labor market, but also with the training quality of future specialists – 40% of graduates do not deem the knowledge which they receive during their special training to be useful to them. After being on the labor market for a while as mid-level specialists, many of them would enroll into college in order to receive higher education and attempt to build their lives according to their idea of life success.

students, graduates, education, career and technical education system, labor market, career and technical education system, career guidance, work opportunities, opinion.

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