Tyurin, Konstantin G.

The article concerns the problem of developing online technologies for adolescents’ career guidance and professional consultation with regard to their huge interest in computer programs (games and other entertainments) on the one hand, and the apparent lack of science-based computer methods of professional self-determination, on the other hand. We analyze the positive and questionable aspects of the design and the practical use of online technologies in professional counseling compared to existing technologies used in the professional consultation. We also consider the capabilities and limitations of these online technologies in solving the basic problems of vocational guidance (information, diagnostic, moral and emotional support of the client, assistance in decision-making and career planning). For example, the development of the author's methodology of “Choose and Go” designed for adolescents’ online use, shows the problem facing the designers of such software products, solutions to these problems. The basic ideas of this methodology are: comprehensive assessment of select work on the basis of full consideration of the psychological structure of the work; the use of expert assessments of the extent to which components of professional activity correspond to the official list of the integrated groups of specialties; the use in the modes of the real and online professional counseling; the account not only the desires of a teenager, but his/her current and potential abilities.

The results of the development of a new computer guidance method for senior schoolchildren on the basis of “Formulas of the profession” (E.A. Klimov) and a modern scheme for the analysis of professions (N.S. Pryazhnikov) are presented. The main stages of obtaining expert estimates are shown, which made it possible to correlate the components of professional activity with the official list of enlarged specialties of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation. The advantage of 3-level grades of schoolchildren (“I want”, “I can now” and “could in the future”) is considered before the traditional assessment of schoolchildren’s actual preferences. In the process of choosing a profession, the preferred characteristics of future work activity are set not in the form of direct estimates of their traditional designations (subject, purpose, means, conditions, etc.), but through paired comparisons of the main labor activities and training activities. The computer-based online testing system works with the methodology through the Web-interface on modern software platforms — Windows, Android, MacOS, iOS, Linux.