Professional Career: Phenomenon, Concepts, Apocryphas

Background. Professional career is an actively evolving socio-psychological phenomenon, which has been studied since the middle of the 20th century as a permanently relevant scientific and scientific-practical issue of high importance for an individual, organization, and state. In established scientific approaches, the phase of a person's active career is often the subject of research. In the practice of career-oriented work with young people, active learning methods are widely used, though the socio-demographic characteristics of students, which are prerequisites for the formation of their career trajectories, are not taken into account. Objective. The research is aimed at studying professional career as a phenomenon and the features of its conceptual explications as a subject of research. Study Participants. 603 people aged 30–50 (61 private security guards, 142 nurses, 89 correspondence students of a technical university and 58 students of a humanitarian university, 36 university teachers, 121 civil servants, 96 teachers) took part in the research. Methods. Historical and theoretical analysis, empirical research (author’s methodology — questionnaire “Dynamics of professional life style”) were applied. Results. The analysis of the survey data showed the links between career success (“vertical career”) and a number of socio-demographic characteristics of people (their parents' positions and education, place of birth and place of residence, birth and upbringing in a complete or incomplete family, self-realization in the family sphere: status and length of marriage, number of children, experience in management). Probably, the value orientations and motives for a person's choice of different professional spheres (with “high” and “flat” hierarchy) and the career success are associated with the above characteristics. Conclusions. The content of the life activity space-time in representatives of different professional spheres (the level of the position held and the education of parents, the position/education ratio, reflecting the social activity and managerial potential of parents; the relationship of the place of residence to the place of birth as the measure of geographical and social mobility; birth and upbringing in a complete or incomplete family; the completeness of a person's self-realization in the family sphere; the ratio of age, length of service and length of management experience) shows the stability of the combination of socio-demographic and official characteristics for the subjects of each professional sample, probably determine their value orientations and motives for choosing a field of activity and success in it.