TOLERANCE TO UNCERTAINTY AS A FACTOR OF DEVELOPING PSYCHOLOGICAL READINESS FOR PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES DURING TRAINING AT A UNIVERSITY

Increasingly, in the unstable global labor market, due to global transformational processes, events are occurring that in one way or another have an impact on all spheres of life. In today’s realities, the problem of developing psychological readiness for professional activity is one of the urgent ones, since there is an acute shortage of specialists who are ready to effectively perform the functions assigned to them, solve professional problems, clearly formulate professional goals and achieve them proactively, be independent and conscious. To be competitive in the labor market, it is not enough to have knowledge in a certain profession. One should have competence in the profession, which includes psychological readiness to work. Specialists with such competence largely contribute to the state’s ability to effectively grow and develop in the scientific, technical, economic, cultural and other spheres of public life. On the one hand, psychology has accumulated a number of facts that clearly indicate the influence of conscious self-regulation on the students’ psychological readiness for professional activities, and on the other hand, these issues have not been studied enough on the samples of students during different periods of training at a university. This substantiates the topicality of this study since it is aimed at identifying predictive connections between the regulatory characteristics of students and the level of their psychological readiness for professional activity, especially during transitional periods of training. It should be noted that psychological readiness for professional activity is developed during the period of training at a university. Psychological readiness for professional activity is a key factor in the effectiveness of the process of a person’s professional development; in conditions of uncertainty, the role of this factor becomes system-forming. Uncertainty in the professional sphere is viewed as a variety of possible scenarios that can develop in conditions of continuous change. This requires students to be willing to take brave and creative steps to solve professional problems in real life. Psychological readiness for professional activity also includes the ability to effectively manage emotions and stress. Thus, the ability to act effectively under conditions of uncertainty, adapt to unforeseen changes and work with limited information is an important characteristic of a professional. The purpose of this study is to identify the relationship between psychological readiness for future professional activity of university students and their attitude to the situation of uncertainty. The study included 121 full-time students of 1–3 years majoring in Economic Security at the Sakhalin Institute of Railway Transport, a branch of the Far Eastern State University of Railways in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. The range of psychodiagnostic tools included: R. V. Ovcharova’s methodology “Motives for choosing a profession”, V. I. Morosanova’s questionnaire “Style of self-regulation of behavior”, S. Badner’s questionnaire in G. U. Soldatova’s adaptation “Definition of tolerance to uncertainty” and T. V. Kornilova’s new questionnaire “Tolerance-intolerance to uncertainty”. The data obtained during the correlation analysis indicate the presence of a significant direct relationship between the studied parameters, namely: the higher the level of tolerance to the situation of uncertainty, the higher the level of students’ psychological readiness to professional activities. According to the results of the study, tolerance to uncertainty can be considered as one of the factors of the development of students’ psychological readiness to work, which is a prerequisite for successful solution of tasks connected with professional development of students.