Image of Profession as a Psychological Formation: A Structural-Phenomenological Analysis

Professional training at the university level shapes a perceptual image of the future profession, in which values and meanings play a key, system-forming role. This article describes the phenomenology, architecture, and system-forming parameters of this image. The image of the world serves as a generic concept relative to the image of the profession. All levels of the worldview reveal professional specificity. The image of the world restructures perceptual and semantic expectations and hypotheses, which help identify phenomena, anticipate the behavior patterns of others, and model one’s own behavior, including in the professional sphere. The image of the profession functions as a value and conceptual meta-context, serving as a memory bank of the perceptual-semantic constructs required to build professional orientations. The article reviews various approaches to the structure of the image of the profession. The structural-block approach is the most common framework; however, it often results in a mechanical projection of a classical set of components (cognitive, emotional, evaluative, motivational, etc.) into the psychological construct. The values and semantics of the image of the profession define its overall architecture and are responsible for meaning-making in professional communication.