Национальный психологический журнал (Dec 2024)
Development of Professional Competencies in IT-specialists
Abstract
Background. The disclosure of patterns of formation and development of basic competencies of specialists is an essential condition for optimizing the process of professional training and improving the effectiveness of information-related activity in general. Objective. The aim is to identify and explain the features and patterns of the genesis of two basic categories of specialists’ competencies: hard-skills and soft-skills in the process of professionalization. Methods. A set of techniques aimed at expert assessment of the degree of formation of the main professional competencies in specialists was applied. The research was based on the synthesis of the judgments concentration method, the method of focus groups and the method of “frequency-significant selection”, as well as on a specially developed methodology for exporting two categories of competencies: hard-skills and soft-skills. In addition, the method of correlation analysis was used, including in the variant of determining the coefficients of the correlation ratio (η). Study Participants. The study involved three experienced groups of specialists from one of the most representative types of this activity — programmers. The first group included persons with up to 1.5 years of experience; the second — with 3 to 4 years of experience; the third — with 7 or more years of experience. Quantitatively, the first group included 72 respondents, the second group consisted of 64 participants, and the third group involved 43 people. 74% of the total number of the entire sample were male, 26% were female. The age range of the surveyed respondents is from 21 to 42 years. Results. It is revealed that the formation and development of a common set of professional competencies, differentiating into two main categories: hard-skills and soft-skills, is based on the principles that are characteristic of system-genesis as a special type of genesis. They are the principles of unevenness and heterochrony. Consequently, the process of professionalization of specialists is also a process of system-genesis. It is proved that in relation to information activity and its genesis, this process acquires fundamentally new characteristics. It unfolds not only in accordance with classical system-genetic patterns, but also appears as a more complex process of metasystem-genesis. This means that it includes the formation and development not only of those determinants that have internal localization in relation to it as a system, but also of those that have extrasystemic localization. They, being functionally included, “embedded” in it, constitute one of the levels of its subjective determinants: the level of meta-competencies, which is formed by the soft-skills category. Due to them, it is possible to minimize those deficits that are inherent in the case of an insufficient level of hard-skills formation, and thereby optimize the activity as a whole. Conclusions. The study established a fundamentally new result, consisting in substantiating the belonging of the process of formation of professional competencies of specialists to the system-genetic type, and the entire process of professionalization should be understood and explained as a process of system-genesis. In addition, in relation to information activity, it is presented in its specific form — as metasystem-genesis, since it also includes the formation of such competencies that are localized outside the activity itself and have the character of meta-competence formations — soft-skills.
Keywords
