May 3, 2023

A few days ago, I happened to attend an event devoted to a new career guidance system — more precisely, a webinar.

Excellent material, interested colleagues in the audience asking questions about the essence of the project. A wonderful speaker. The discussion focused on the “Ticket to the Future” project as a kind of strategic program for developing career guidance over the coming years.

But after the webinar, I felt sad.

I know almost nothing about camels, apart from a couple of the most familiar facts: probably that they can spit impressively and that they have two humps, which help them survive in the difficult conditions of deserts and semi-deserts.

But I do know something about career guidance, because — at first by force of circumstance and later by conscious choice — I have been working in career guidance since 1999. Fourteen of those years I spent in the education system, at a Center that served as the district career guidance center for students in general education schools. Later it became a college, but it preserved the tradition of giving a leading role in the psychological support of the educational process specifically to career guidance for pupils and students.

And after the webinar I mentioned at the beginning, for some reason I remembered a humorous saying: “A camel has two humps because life is a struggle...”

I remembered it first of all because the webinar presented a career-guidance approach in which the school is the main setting where career guidance is carried out. The primary target group of the program is students from grades 6 through 11. The idea was voiced that different career-guidance tasks could be handled with the participation of various school specialists: educational psychologists, social educators, homeroom teachers/tutors, subject teachers, and everyone, everyone, everyone... And once again we heard the familiar phrase: “the school must...”

Colleagues asked how the additional workload for teachers was supposed to be paid if career-guidance work was added to everything already placed on their shoulders... And those shoulders already carry a great deal. Unfortunately, very little of it is directly related to the Teacher’s main professional function — to give knowledge, to TEACH. We can also recall the second function: to educate and bring up.

And it was in relation first and foremost to teachers and educators that the joke about camels came back to me... Remembering my own experience in education and taking into account the views of many parents who regularly deal with teachers and school administrations, I felt sadness and sympathy for these important and much-needed professionals. Because within the project’s ideology, it turns out to be one more “must,” one more “have to” in a whole system of other “musts” pressing down on teachers’ shoulders: enormous amounts of electronic and paper documentation, additional duties that mercilessly “eat away” the time available for their main tasks... And work — and sometimes life — turns into a struggle: for free time; to live up to one’s professional status and title; for the possibility of carrying out one’s main responsibilities within a period of time that keeps shrinking little by little...

I also remembered my own growing up and that of my peers. We — those who are now roughly between forty and fifty-five — were the ones who went through the first, and then the second, rounds of career-guidance testing in schools. We were the ones who experienced the system of educational-production complexes, which in the final two or three school years provided some simple vocational qualification. In that system, one could become acquainted with the work of a turner, locksmith, secretary-typist, librarian, or computer operator — at the time, using the first still-Soviet computers.

We were the ones taken on excursions to plants and factories; the ones who did summer practical placements there through school; the ones divided into what were almost the first specialized classes: technical, humanities, and natural sciences...

Personally, as a child with stronger humanities inclinations, I managed to explore at least three professional areas. For two years we studied history and archaeology, visited museums, and went to real archaeological excavations in central Moscow. The second area was library work: the work of different library departments, the organization of catalogs, and so on. In the third year, at a vocational school, I studied typing and, to some extent, the rules for preparing documents, because these were courses for secretary-typists. To this day I very much regret that shorthand was not included in our training — I never got around to learning it on my own.

Did any of this prove useful later in life? Only to a very limited extent, although thanks to that last course I still type quite fluently using the “touch typing with all ten fingers” method, which makes working on a computer and with documents much easier. I could navigate library catalogs easily when I was at university and needed to read additional literature... At one time I knew many interesting facts about the history of the city... Did all of this help me choose my future profession? Hardly. Was it useful in my professional work as a psychologist?.. Hardly, and where it was useful, only very selectively... It turned out that all these school activities were aimed more at acquiring individual life skills and knowledge — perhaps useful later — than at helping us choose a professional future and prepare for it. With all of this in my experience, I, like most of my classmates, approached the end of school with the same unanswered question: WHAT SHOULD I BECOME?..

The webinar was attended by people roughly my age, and as I listened I wondered: how many of us — those who went through all these forms of career guidance — nevertheless ended up choosing “the wrong profession”? Or spend their whole lives doing work they do not like and do not find appealing?.. How many of us — those now between forty and fifty-five — have changed professions, sometimes radically? Moved from mathematics or energy engineering into psychology, for example?.. Or from a design bureau into marketing?.. Or from a former research institute into education, and then into paperwork?..

How many of us, despite having gone through career guidance, are still “restless souls”?..

And following these thoughts, something else occurred to me.

We adults are constantly trying to invent something for teenagers... Something of our own, based on our ideas and our experience, our knowledge and desires. But where is the teenager in all of this?

When did we ask them what they lack in order to decide on their future? To choose a profession? To make a decision?.. When did we... listen to their answer?

In my experience of career-guidance counseling, the issue of choosing a profession is most often only a screen behind which other questions stand. And those questions are more important both to the teenager and to the decision they ultimately make. Being informed about the world of professions and the labor market is also far from the most important issue. Important, yes. But not the main one. Because knowledge can be acquired, and information is even easier to acquire than knowledge.

But it is much harder to acquire, for example, self-confidence. And there are very few places and situations in a teenager’s life where they can make independent decisions in a safe environment. To build the skill the way a gymnast does: first training on a beam set at the lowest height, and then gradually higher and higher... Because a practiced skill relieves fear: the fear of making a mistake; the habit of judging the consequences of one’s decisions as catastrophic; and finally the habit of “being lazy” — postponing a decision, and action, until the very last moment... Who among us is not familiar with procrastination?..

How often do we adults set aside time simply to listen to a teenager — and not only to a teenager? To support them? Calmly and sincerely showing that we really are on their side and that they have the right to make THEIR OWN decisions and make mistakes in them. How often are we able simply to believe in the person who is beside us?..

In conclusion, I would like to add one remark: purely out of personal curiosity, I am currently analyzing the results of the nationwide monitoring of young people’s value orientations, which the Institute of Education of the Russian Academy of Education conducted regularly over the past several years. It seems to me that a great deal of interesting material for reflection can be “drawn out” of it — including on career guidance. As soon as I finish, I will try to share my ideas and hypotheses as well.

For now, I would like to note two interesting facts relevant to the subject of this note: in 2022, around 90% of the adolescents and young adults surveyed said that defending their personal boundaries and independence was extremely important to them, and 59% considered respect for the personal boundaries of every family member to be one of the most important family values...

The number of adolescents and young adults surveyed — aged 14 to 35 — was around 100,000...