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More than 70% of schoolchildren do not know who they want to become, according to a study by the Young Professionals (WorldSkills Russia) union. How to determine the predisposition of the child and what is more important – talent or interest – in the material
About the expert: Pavel Spetsian is the General Director of Shag Computer Academy.
What is “innate ability”
There is no single definition of “talent”: it is usually explained as a set of abilities, moreover, realized ones. And in the Big Psychological Dictionary of authorship by Boris Meshcheryakov and Vladimir Zinchenko, “talent” is not called a scientific concept at all, but an everyday one, since there are no diagnostic methods for it. It also correlates with the concept of “giftedness” and can be defined as a high level of ability development. In The Structure of the Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences by American psychologist Howard Gardner, seven types of talent or type of intelligence are described:
According to them, a person receives inclinations for a certain profession. For example, the verbal-linguistic type of intelligence is responsible for the ability to write and read, respectively, it is easier to become a journalist or a lawyer with it.
The Dutch neuroscientist Dick Swaab, in turn, said that talent is laid in the brain (in fact, it depends on its structure), and in the book he cited the example of violinists who have an enlarged part of the brain that controls the fingers of their left hand. And in a study by the Institute of Genetics and Cytology of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Belarus, it was possible to identify differences between child athletes (with inherent inclinations) from “normal” ones – an increased ability to utilize glucose in the liver and muscle fibers and resistance to hypoxia in genes. Among musicians and artists, the G allele prevailed, which is responsible for the ability to perform work for a long time at the same intensity, which forms psychological endurance.
Talent implies a person’s ability to do a certain thing: for example, he draws amazingly, while not knowing the theory thoroughly, or he learns languages two or three times faster than his peers. However, talent is only a predisposition, which, without proper development, does not contribute to the development of any profession. In different sources, talent is assigned from 5% to 10% of all success factors – the rest depends on perseverance and hard work. For example, there is the “10 hour rule” voiced by Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell, which says that in order to achieve expertise in any business, you need to dedicate 10 hours to it. It was formed after a 1993 study of the growth of the skill of violinists and pianists. Its authors refuted the importance of talent and pointed out that the differences in the results of musicians were reduced only to the volume of their practice. The value of 10 thousand hours is arbitrary, but the idea itself is correct: it is much more important to have an interest in a particular area than abilities.
For example, if a person sings great by nature, but he is not interested in it, he will not learn and develop, and will not become an excellent singer. The same applies to other professions. At the same time, even the brightest talent still needs to be discovered. And this does not always happen when parents watch with emotion their two-year-old daughter, sitting in the splits and standing on the bridge without preparation, imitating the gymnasts on the TV screen. In order for a conditional talent to develop, a person must devote all his free time to this, which means that he must be interested in a particular activity. No amount of talent would have helped Bill Gates become a global IT figure if he hadn’t had a passion for programming since he was a teenager.
Mistakes of parents in preparing a child for a future profession
One of the main and most common mistakes is that parents project onto their child their desires and dreams that were not realized in childhood. For example, a mother wanted to become a swimmer, but something did not work out, and now she subconsciously or consciously intends to raise a swimmer from her son. Well, if he is also passionate about this, ready to do it. But it also happens that the child does not want to, and sometimes there are no abilities at all. In adolescence, it often happens that parents decide to make their son a physicist without asking what he wants. Perhaps the child will even unlearn the prescribed four years, receive a diploma, but as a result, he will not go to work in his specialty or will not last long in it.
The discrepancy between the expectations of the future profession among children and parents is also evident from the surveys: for example, the Romir holding found out in 2019 that 24% of our country would like their child to become a doctor, 18% – a lawyer. But only 12% of schoolchildren wanted to go into medicine, and 6% into law.
Another mistake is to try to prepare a child from the age of five to be conditional surgeons. The world is changing rapidly and sometimes unexpectedly, as the pandemic has confirmed. No one knows what will be in demand 12-13 years later, when he finishes school, and even more so after 16-17 years, when he graduates from the university.
It is possible and necessary to develop certain abilities and skills of a child from childhood, but there is no point in trying to guess a promising direction for today’s preschooler and even primary schoolchildren.
Another reason why you should not actively engage in career guidance for a child at six, seven or even ten years old is the risk of depriving him of his childhood. Parents who are trying to raise a future great pianist or a second Bill Gates from the cradle, force the child to practice daily, send them to sections and make sure that the loads are maximum, or even try to simultaneously develop all the skills at once. For example, in addition to hockey, they force you to play basketball – as if if you don’t succeed in one sport, you can go to the second. The child is overloaded: he does not have time for walks with friends, going to the cinema and various important “children’s affairs”.
Modern approaches to identifying the interests of the child and their shortcomings
A RANEPA study showed that 42% of parents send their children to various circles. In fact, this is the first thing moms and dads start with when trying to determine what a child will like. Sports sections are in the greatest demand, follows from the data of Yula and Research.Mail.ru. When a child goes to classes in several circles at once, on the one hand, he receives a versatile development. In the future, this will help him one way or another: conditional gymnastics in childhood will give posture, drawing – a sense of color, chess will develop logic. The life experience of children who study in different sections is richer, according to HSE experts. But several circles are also congestion, the inability to concentrate on one thing, to go deeper, so here you need to decide after the first year what to give up and what to develop more actively.
Another approach is to observe the interests of the child. For example, parents see that a child begins to dance or sing along with the sound of any music, and enroll him in a music school or dance. On the one hand, such an analysis creates a connection between parents and the child, helps to better understand him. On the other hand, if mom and dad decide that singing is the same thing and try to develop only this direction, the question of congestion of the child’s psyche and the problem of narrowing the general horizons again arise: the child sees nothing but a music school. It was lucky if you guessed it, and he really will become a good artist, but perhaps after school he will abruptly want to go to veterinary medicine, but the necessary skills were not obtained in childhood and adolescence, and biology was barely passed on “satisfactory”.
In schools, the use of career guidance tests is popular: the child solves a set of tasks, and the results are analyzed by a machine that, as a result, issues a conclusion: for example, a high propensity for art and natural sciences, poor skills in mathematics, logic. The advantage of tests is the opportunity to receive recommendations in several areas at once, where the child should develop, and make a choice. But such results do not differ in absolute accuracy and strongly depend on the variability of the child’s psyche. Today the child is in the mood to choose one answer, tomorrow another, and the results will change accordingly. There are also tests that determine talent through neurometry (assessment of brain activity by microimpulses) – for example, Verbatoria has such tests. But some scientists dispute the effectiveness of the technique (in particular, Galina Rezapkina, a researcher at the RANEPA, discusses this in the article). In addition, brain impulses change under the influence of various factors (from stress to pathologies), and in this case there is a risk of regularly receiving different “conclusions” about talent.
Career guidance milestones
In most children without any pronounced abilities (for example, absolute ear for music at three years old), a tendency to certain types of activity is revealed at the age of seven or eight, when the period of play activity ends and the development of the emotional sphere begins. Until this age, mostly creative abilities are manifested, and often there is no point in doing anything seriously, because the child is not yet able to realize, for example, gymnastics or swimming as “work”. The decision to dive into it for him is a game that depends on the “want” / “don’t want” factors. Until the age of seven or eight, a child as a whole may be interested only in play activities and go to clubs only for the sake of friends. And only then will the time of real interest in sports, music or chess begin.
Adolescence crisis (about 13 years old) can also affect the interests of a child who begins to look for himself in the world. Moreover, two options are possible: an attempt to become as independent as possible and choose an “adult” occupation, or, conversely, by all means try to push back growing up and return to children’s hobbies. For example, a child went in for swimming before school, then quit, and at the age of 13-15 he wants to go there again, simply because the emotional process returns him to a conditional six to seven years.
After the completion of the teenage period (18-19 years), the emotional sphere begins to lose ground in front of the rational one, and this can also affect the change in a person’s interests. The choice of a profession is already more often made not by the criterion of “like” or “dislike”, but taking into account the prospects, demand, usefulness for the world and society. In a Brazilian study of people aged 12-65 years, there are clear changes in values over the course of life. For 20-30 year olds, the desire for career growth was typical, while after 30 years of age, interest in the family grew, and here the stability of the profession, and not its prospects, may come to the fore.
In a 2014 study by the ADV Group (no other such study has been done), interest changes with age are clearly visible. For teenagers aged 13-17, the emphasis is on video games, sports, fashion, music and dance, while for students aged 18-24, priorities are shifting: sports are losing relevance and disappearing from the top. Perhaps one of the reasons is that parents at this age already cease to influence the choice of the child, and he may leave the sections to which he was sent. In addition, often after school, those who do not plan to continue to connect life with sports leave it. For young people aged 25-34, fashion remains in the top of interests, a craving for cooking appears and sports return to their former positions. After 35 years, the picture remains the same, but travel is added, and after 45 years, literature enters the top, which remains relevant for people aged 55-64, and for those who are 65-74 years old, but art and cinema are also added here.
Career guidance of the future
First of all, learning and retraining can become a continuous process. This means that the idea of “working in company X in position Y until retirement” will no longer be relevant. A person can change several professions, even unrelated ones, and for each one he will need to acquire new skills. Therefore, the issue of vocational guidance will arise repeatedly – not only at the beginning of the 11th grade to determine the list of exams and universities for admission.
Another consequence follows from this: instead of one-time tests, vocational guidance will turn into a part of the schoolchildren’s curriculum. For example, in the form of subjects that immerse in the features of a particular specialty, or in the form of visits to various companies, laboratories, where, in the format of an excursion or even practice, you can delve into the activity of interest, learn about its features and pitfalls.
At the same time, the number of highly specialized career guidance methods, in particular in the field of IT, may increase. With the rapidly developing digitalization, parents will be more and more interested in the fact that the child goes into the field of technology, but today this is no longer one profession of a conditional “programmer” or “informatics”, but several dozen narrow areas. And career guidance methods will have to determine who exactly will be interested in developing a particular person (child or adult): he wants to become a cool system administrator, web designer or developer.
And no less important point – it is necessary to abandon the recommendation of specific professions in various services for career guidance. The world is changing too rapidly, it is unrealistic and pointless to compile a complete database of specialties: what is relevant today may completely disappear in a year. Hybrid professions are emerging, such as a data journalist who writes texts and works with databases. Therefore, recommendations will become more relevant not for specific specialties like “developer”, “veterinarian”, but for areas of activity – for example, “social assistance”.