Journey to the right profession

This school and professional guidance practice represents a way by which students are guided to outline an educational path, taking into account the psycho-aptitude profile and the real external conditions and possibilities of their application, as the first stage in a broader process aimed at career guidance and counselling. This is a necessity considering that we are faced with an increasingly diversified and complex educational and occupational offer. This practice involves 3 major stages: assessment, building the psycho-aptitude profile and establishing the educational pathway.

In the evaluation stage, we have the following objectives in mind: investigating learning motivation (scoring the answers to questions such as: why do I learn?, how do I learn?, when do I learn?, which provides students with information such as reasons and goals of learning, learning style, learning strategies and investigating personality elements (strengths and weaknesses, interests, skills, values, decision-making styles).

In the stage of building the psycho-aptitude profile, we start from all the elements captured in the evaluation stage, namely, strengths and weaknesses, interests, skills, personal values, learning styles and decision-making styles, which I will corroborate and subsequently establish the above-mentioned profile.

In the stage of establishing the educational pathway, we start from the general goal the student has (e.g.: I want to attend law school, I want to become a dancer, I want to have my own business, etc.) and together we draw up some smart objectives that we will take into account when developing the educational path. I also take into account the student's conceptions and myths related to the future career, the relationship with parents, with teachers, as well as previous learning experiences as a predictor of future school performance and career decision.

In the Ionita Asan theoretical high school in the city of Caracal, we designed and applied this practice to the 8th graders at the beginning of the year, for a period of 10 weeks, working physically directly with the students, in a face-to-face manner and in groups, having a meeting once a week, as follows:

1. The first meeting is called “First Steps carrying the Motivation” in which students receive a worksheet in which they must answer questions such as: why do I learn?, how do I learn?, when do I learn? and then they go through a set of statements that investigate the learning style and strategies. At the end of the meeting, each student has the reasons that make them learn and come to school, the way they learn and their learning style.
2. The second and third meetings are called “Looking Deeply into the Personality Bag” which aims, as mentioned above, at investigating personality elements, as a precursor to the vocational identity profile and is structured over 2 hours: in the first hour SWOT analysis and the Holland Test (short version of 30 questions) are used as working techniques. In the second hour we use worksheets to investigate skills, values and decision-making styles. At the end of these meetings we discuss the results obtained, with explanations and examples.
3. The fourth meeting is called "Face to face with me: my personality profile." In this meeting, students will bring with them all the worksheets worked on up to that point, placed in a plastic folder in the order of their completion, and together with each one we will outline the personal psycho-aptitude profile, having an already worked example of an older student, who participated in this process the previous year.
4. At the fifth meeting, which called "Face to Face with Concepts, Myths and Objectives", we identify and explore in the group the students' conceptions, ideas and myths regarding their future career and educational path, the relationship with teachers and parents, the general goal related to the profession and the formulation of smart objectives, as a starting point in building the educational pathway.
5. The sixth meeting is called "From the present to the future on the timeline" and aims to develop the educational path starting from the objectives through the drawing technique as follows: a line is drawn on the diagonal of an A4 sheet, the present point where the student is located (A) is established and they walk along the line, placing the objectives fixed above the line and the ways of achieving them above the line from place to place until they reach the end of the line in the future (point B) where the career decision or goal of each person related to their professional future is written.
6. The seventh meeting is called: "Parents want to know too" in which we usually schedule a meeting with the parents of the students participating in the program and in the first phase inform them about the existence and application of the "Journey to the Right Profession" program in school, about the discoveries made regarding their own children and the personal recommendations they make to parents for understanding and supporting their own children in making the correct and conscious choice of their future profession and maintaining an open and active communication channel in relation to the school.
7. The eighth meeting takes place 3 weeks after the seventh, it is called "first objective achieved" and has at its center the idea of follow-up through which we verify the stage at which the student is in achieving the set objectives and the level at which he is on the timeline regarding the set educational path. This meeting aims to verify the level of school motivation, the degree of involvement in achieving the set objectives and any psycho-emotional difficulties that may arise along the way.

The guidance activities within the “Journey to the right profession” program aim at personal development and equipping the young person with the information/knowledge and skills necessary for effective management of their future career and can be applied to high school students, grades XI-XII. This is necessary in the conditions of a flexible and largely unpredictable labor market, which is constantly changing, both in its external configuration (the share of various professions on the labor market and the changing relationship between them), and internal (changes in the requirements imposed by various professions).