Approaches to the essential characteristic of students' readiness for professional activity

The article describes the views of scientists on the problem of readiness for professional activity. The author identifies the most common approaches of researchers regarding the characterization of the concept «readiness for professional activity» (personal, functional, systemic, personal-activity, result-activity); summarizes the proposed interpretations of the definition of readiness for professional activity and shows a considerable number of definitions of this concept (readiness as a condition, result, phenomenon, process, quality, purpose, etc.). The analysis of the above formulations shows that they are complementary, but not contradictory, since each of them highlights certain aspects of understanding the essence of such readiness, significantly broadens and deepens the understanding of the complexity and versatility of the «readiness» phenomenon. Students' readiness for professional activity can be understood as a multilevel personal neoplasm, which is formed in several sub-structures of the personality and which are interconnected: the personal component of readiness (substructure of orientation, substructure of mental processes, substructure of biopsychic properties); functional component of readiness (experience substructure). The author analyzes the relationship between the concepts of «preparation», «readiness for professional activity», «professional competence»: the purpose and result of professional training of specialists is their readiness for professional activity, which organically contributes to the formation of professional competence through systematic self-improvement of personality, the accumulation of professional etc. Professional competence is seen not only as a result of professional training, but also as an integration of experience and further self-education, the ability to solve professional problems. The competency approach integrates the above approaches of researchers, penetrates the students' readiness for professional activity and aims to develop professional competence.