Keyword: «innovative forms of vocational guidance»

Professional career and social success of school graduates in the future depend greatly on the early choice of future profession. This vocational choice determines subsequent professional mobility. The right vocational choice is the most important condition for a young person to launch a professional career successfully. Moreover, it is as an urgent government task to educate a competitive professional. Teachers play the leading role in the professional socialization of high school students. Teachers may use various forms of vocational guidance, including innovative ones, to achieve career-oriented goals. Today, innovative vocational guidance work is an urgent pedagogical issue of the special significance. Nowadays, one of the innovative forms of vocational guidance is vocation trials, which make it possible for schoolchildren to learn professional tasks specific to a particular profession and to try the elements of particular type of labor activities. Thus, schoolchildren acquire practical experience of ‘immersion’ to the profession, which allows them to make the informed choice in favor of a particular profession. The purpose of the paper is to describe the methodology of designing vocation trials. Moreover, the authors present the experiment results obtained during the specific vocation trial “profession of a photographer”. This study uses the following scientific methods: monographic analysis, modeling of pedagogical processes, questioning and analysis of the vocation trials results. During the monographic analysis the authors specify the “vocation trial’ concept and show various points of view on its interpretation. The paper analyzes realization of vocation trials and describes authors’ approach to the design and implementation of the vocation trial “profession of a photographer”. The results of the study clearly demonstrate that vocation trials help schoolchildren to make more informed choice in favor of a particular profession basing on personal experience and their own vocation trial. The theoretical significance of the paper is due to the contribution to the development of scientific ideas about the pedagogical designing of vocation trials, stages and conditions. The practical significance lies in the detailed methodological development of “vocation trials” pedagogical technology, which allows teachers and social instructors to use the technology as the innovative form of vocational guidance. Moreover, the proposed methodology can be used at universities.