Career guidance as a pedagogical process: what is more effective — tests, trials, mentors, or career pathways

Abstract

The article examines career guidance as a pedagogical process unfolding over time, sensitive to the high uncertainty of the labor market and to changes in the nature of professional identity in the digital era, when choice ceases to be a one-time decision and requires the development of the learner’s agentic position. The analysis focuses on a comparison of four common technologies for supporting self-determination — psychometric testing, professional trials, mentoring, and the design of individual career pathways — based on long-term observation of the educational and subsequent trajectories of high school students, as well as on multilevel data verification, including monitoring the stability of interests and digital indicators of engagement. To assess effectiveness, indicators are introduced that make it possible to move beyond a formal accounting of participation coverage: a coefficient of choice awareness, an index of professional stability, and conversion into specialized education. Quantitative results demonstrate a pronounced advantage of interactive and practice-oriented formats: mentoring provides the highest levels of awareness and stability, professional trials generate a strong immersion effect and increase the likelihood of subsequent specialized education, whereas testing, despite its mass accessibility, is largely limited to an informational screening function and is weakly associated with the development of readiness for action. Career pathways occupy an intermediate position: they are less effective without reinforcement through real experience, but are clearly associated with growth in self-organization and critical thinking. An additional contribution of the study lies in differentiating the developmental potential of the technologies in terms of soft skills and in analyzing the relationship between pedagogical effect and resource intensity, showing why inexpensive diagnostic solutions dominate in practice despite their limited long-term effectiveness. The necessity of combining methods is substantiated, and a synergistic effect of the sequential application of diagnostics, trials, and mentoring is identified, which increases satisfaction with professional choice and reduces the risk of erroneous trajectories, offering grounds for the design of modular, age-targeted career guidance programs.