We are chosen, we choose…According to what is relevant according to the Educational Portal, 80% of university graduates do not work in the profession they have acquired.
Why? I will tell a typical story of choosing a specialty, when the dreams of the applicant and the possibilities of his parents come into conflict. Let’s imagine a girl who saw herself as a journalist all her conscious life, ran her own blog, sharpened her pen, participated in filling the school website, led school events, because she also dreamed of a television future. And now the time has come for Ch, our heroine creates an electronic office and submits an application for her dream specialty. Parents, who are also involved in choosing their child’s future, think rationally and reasonably: it is worth applying to places where there is a guaranteed budget.
And so our heroine, as soon as the admissions commissions start working, runs to her dream university and applies for Journalism. They do not pass the budget. The ball is too small. However, the girl hopes for the understanding of her parents, whose next step is to conclude an agreement with the university and pay for her education. However, in vain. The parents, having weighed the pros and cons and seeing that their daughter passed the budget place in Food Technologies, transfer the documents there. It’s simple math. According to the data of 2024 (we take them for illustrative purposes), the volume of state orders for the mentioned specialty is 1,350 places, while there are only 223 places for “Journalism”. It is about the scale of the country. Will a person who planned to be a journalist work in a food company after graduation? Hardly, but she will have a diploma. Parents count on this. In the conditions of war and total economic crisis, such a calculation is, of course, quite logical. But we are talking about the selection of applicants.
You can name many other reasons for not getting into the profession of your dreams. The dynasty of engineers or agronomists or teachers forces children to choose a specialty that is close and understandable to the family. Due to insufficient career guidance work, graduates cannot decide where to go next, so they submit documents “for a company” with friends, neighbors, and relatives. Someone is satisfied with the fact that the university is close to home. Someone, on the contrary, is attracted to a dormitory and, accordingly, a university where graduates of their native school study.
There are many reasons – one result. A choice that could become fateful for yesterday’s schoolchildren turns out to be wrong. As a result, the state spends money on the training of engineers, lawyers, psychologists, and teachers who do not work in their profession for a single day.
There is also the problem of the deformation of the professional identity, which occurs with the students who have a distorted idea of the future profession. It has a strong basis for the disappointment of potential specialists, but this is another, very broad topic.
The “Diary of an applicant” resource conducted a number of surveys regarding the choice of current school graduates. Their results are quite telling, and the sample is representative enough to draw conclusions.
49% of current entrants made the decision on their own, or think they made it without outside influences, although we fully understand that such decisions do not mature in a vacuum. It is a shame that 9% of school graduates said that they made their own choice because there was simply no one to consult with. Traditional sources of influence on children are equally distributed: parents, teachers, tutors, friends, peers… It is interesting that when revealing their options, children wrote about cinema, media and even fan fiction as sources of ideas about future professions. Needless to say, the romanticized notions gleaned from such sources ultimately shatter the realities of professional life.
For understanding the psychological basis of the right/wrong choice, the following answers of applicants are also indicative.
As we can see, the leader among applicants’ hesitation is the inability to decide what yesterday’s schoolchildren expect from life. Many of them have conflicting opinions about the future of the profession. For some, there is a conflict between different aspects of the specialty – its attractiveness and, let’s say, low pay. Some worry that over time the demand for their dream profession will fall, so today’s choice will not justify itself. The answer option is also very revealing – I am afraid to confess my desires to those closest to me. It testifies to parental pressure on children and to the deformation of their future already at the stage of admission to higher education.
In general, the applicants’ responses testify to the need for more active career guidance, elementary communication with representatives of those professions that are attractive to schoolchildren. This will not solve the problem of the wrong professional choice one hundred percent, but it will reduce the level of confusion of applicants during the admission campaign.
