professional career

The relevance of the research issue is due to the following: an increase in the length of a person’s working life creates a socially and personally significant ‘second reality’ that comprises the individual’s ideas about oneself, about the profession, success, etc. Purpose: to study the subject’s ideas about one’s career. Hypotheses: 1) The subject’s ideas about their career (as the evolution of professional and working life) act as regulators of the dynamics of the processes of one’s age-related professional evolution.

The relevance of the study is determined the following: increase in the duration of a person’s working life and the expansion of the articulate components of its quality create a socially and psychologically signifi cant “second reality”, by which we mean subjective ideas about one’s profession, about one’s career, and about their social success. The research purpose is to study the ideas of the professional activity subjects about the age-related evolution of their qualities.

The aim of the research presented in the article: historical and theoretical analysis of the scientific concepts of human development periodization (as a subject of activity, as a personality). The paper describes the phenomenon of “professional career”, the complexity of its full and adequate scientific explication and analyses the well-known concepts of human development periodization (S. Freud, P. P. Blonsky, L. S. Vygotsky, R. Kegan, J. Piaget, C. Buhler, E. Erikson) and the concepts of human development periodization as a subject of labour (D. Super, E. A.

The phenomenon of “professional career”, the complexity of its full and adequate scientific explication is considered. One of the ways to promote a constructive study of a career is an appeal to a set of complementary methodological approaches. The experience of the development of an integrative approach, including combinations of system-genetic, ecological (ecopsychological) and system triads approach, is proposed. It is shown that each of the methodological approaches has its limitations and possibilities.