Do Industrial Jobs Have Good Prospects? A Sociological Survey of School Students from the Ural

Abstract

Education organizations need to reconceptualize their career guidance activities in the context of global digitalization and technological development. The current changes on the labor market make it necessary to study schoolchildren’s ideas about industrial jobs. Professional preferences of school students usually depend on their age and reflect new success models, i.e., the so-called fluid life trajectories. This research featured the attitudes of school students to industrial professions with their attractiveness and unattractiveness in terms of future career plans. The online survey covered 7628 students of 9th and 11th grades, a semi-formalized expert interview with young employees under 35 (n = 204) and a focus group of ten young employees of Kalinin Machine-Building Plant, Yekaterinburg. Theschool students based their career attitudes on the following assumptions. First, they lacked awareness of scientific and technological development in engineering and, as a result, considered this profession unpopular. Second, they did not perceive factory professions as prestigious because of the Soviet model of a factory worker as a servant to the factory.The unattractive features of a factory-related job were described as unhealthy, difficult, with no career prospects, and monotonous. The only attractive feature was stability. Engineering received a more favorable description, i.e., promising, diverse, well-paid, and challenging. The concept of a factory worker was shaped by the experience of parents: 50% of school students had very outdated knowledge of industrial production.