Talk for NZARE based on paper by Megan Anakin, Hongzhi Yang, Suxiang Yu, Biljana Ivanova-Miloshevska, Andy Blunden & John Cripps Clark.
A critical phase in the formation of a professional identity is the “trainee dilemma.” This dilemma marks the transition from a formally qualified to an actually capable professional. Using concepts from Cultural-Historical Activity Theory we consider how the development of professional competence extends beyond formal education to include development of a new professional identity shaped by workplace experiences and interactions with senior colleagues. Formal education cannot fully equip trainees for the practical demands of professional life. The workplace introduces new stimuli that require the integration of scientific and everyday concepts through experiential learning and social interaction.
Our analysis was developed by drawing on the literature, interviews with professional educators, and our own research data. The concept of perezhivanie is central and used to show how transformative experiences are integrated into the trainee’s personality, reshaping their professional identity through challenging events and interactions. Measured support systems, such as mentorship and authentic tasks involving risk, are essential for fostering the trainee’s development while providing safety nets to mitigate failures. Becoming a competent, confident, and committed professional is a transformative journey that not only enhances practical skills but also aligns the trainee’s professional and personal identities.
Nowadays, an increasing proportion of people complete an extensive program of post-secondary education to qualify for a profession. Even occupations not formerly recognised as professions, such as early childhood education, now require formal education. Becoming a professional is an important life-stage. But being qualified in a profession does not mean a person is capable to act as a professional.
This gap is the trainee dilemma: qualified but not yet capable, as important and difficult as any other transitional stage of personal development.
Successfully completing formal educational tasks is a different kind of activity than diagnosing and treating a patient or teaching a child multiplication. Being a professional is a different kind of activity and requires a different kind of person. Becoming a professional requires a development of the whole person, not just acquiring additional skills. The transition requires a restructuring of the personality, so that the person responds appropriately to stimuli originating from the workplace situation.
For the trainee (as for the child) of critical importance is measured support by the people working around them. Support is measured when people provide neither too much nor too little guidance, advice, coaching, or mentorship. However, the trainee is an adult, not a child, and is responsible for their own actions.
Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria demonstrated that human beings control their future behaviour ‘from outside’, so to speak, by creating relevant links in advance of the situation actually arising. This insight leads to a theory of the development of the personality which emphasises the person’s relations to the world (otnosheniya) rather than traits, such as temperament or introversion. In this view, the trainee’s fellow workers play an important role in modelling, guiding, supporting, and supervising the trainee. Off-site training can do only so much.
There are two interrelated aspects to becoming a professional. Firstly, a person must be able to access the formal knowledge, acquired by institutions over centuries and apply this knowledge appropriately in the work situation. Secondly, others must give recognition to the person that they are capable. Only when both are true can the person say: “Yes, I’m a professional.”
Vygotsky’s well-known distinction between ‘scientific’ and ‘everyday’ concepts is important here.
Scientific concepts include those that are scientific, religious, or aesthetic. They are first acquired via instruction in an institutional setting and in a formal learning context such as by reading books or listening to lectures. While such concepts develop by becoming more concrete by connecting with other scientific concepts as part of some system of concepts, but initially, they are only formal in the sense they that have no direct relation to personal experience.
Everyday concepts, on the other hand, are acquired in everyday interaction with other people and the cultural artefacts of a community. Everyday concepts are constituted from life experience. If the scientific concept remains as it is, without merging with personal experiences, then it remains merely empty words. Conversely, if the everyday concept remains unschooled in the historically acquired knowledge of the relevant culture, then it cannot rise to the demands made on an experienced professional.
The concept of perezhivanie is helpful in theorising the trainee dilemma. A perezhivanie is an experience together with the catharsis in which a person integrates the experience into their entire personality. In a perezhivanie, the emphasis is placed on how the person actively responds to a surprising, difficult, threatening or impossible situation, rather than just what happens to them. The personality (lichnost) is understood as a structure of ‘commitments’ or otnosheniya. It is through perezhivaniya that these commitments are formed. Central to the personality will be a commitment to the profession itself. Passage through the trainee dilemma is not a gradual process. It is made up of a series of discrete and relatively minor perezhivaniya. It is through many perezhivaniya that the trainee builds the concrete ideal of what it means to be a capable doctor or teacher. These perezhivaniya are experienced each time the trainee confronts an unfamiliar situation and either succeeds or fails. Failure and success in these perezhivaniya and especially how they cope with these crises have a cumulative effect on the trainee; they shape their personality and how they view their profession.
Initially, the trainee’s otnosheniya include their commitment to their ideal of their chosen profession. This conception will at first be abstract, perhaps the image of one good teacher that inspired them or a general understanding of the word ‘medicine’. Later, all the little perezhivaniya — the minor embarrassments, the traumatic mistakes, the exhilarating achievements, the successful interventions by others — will fill out and colour the ideal the trainee has of their profession. Their concept of the profession will be a concrete ideal, that is, an ideal which has been enriched with nuances and connections due to experience.
A qualified trainee will not automatically be a capable professional. The trainee may experience traumatic failure and become a capable professional only after experiencing humiliations, embarrassment, burnout, and possibly even causing injury to others. Such perezhivaniya may disfigure their professional abilities and identity. To avoid such negative outcomes, newly qualified professionals need assistance from senior colleagues. This assistance might include mentorship and coaching. But support must include authentic tasks with real people that include a risk of failure but failing safely so that no one is injured. Passively observing someone doing the task correctly is insufficient because the trainee must learn to master their own actions in the midst of the relevant stimuli.
Failure is an integral part of professional development. Rather than avoiding failure, it should be moderated and embraced as a valuable learning opportunity. Trainees need to engage in authentic tasks that carry a risk of failure but allow them to fail safely without harming a patient or person. Rather than fail-safe tasks, the ‘safe-fail’ task is one which can tolerate risk while providing opportunities for trainees to learn from their mistakes. The safe-fail task can help trainees learn from their negative perezhivaniya by reflecting on and adjusting their subsequent practices.
The riskiness of tasks in the workplace is an essential character of a profession. Simulation exercises help prepare the student for work situations but cannot replace the perezhivanie of completing a task in which such risks are successfully negotiated. We describe the tasks in which a trainee either fails or succeeds despite the difficulty and risks as a perezhivanie. It is only through such perezhivaniya that personal development takes place.
When undergoing formal training for a profession a student learns rules such as ‘when I see this, then I do that’. Such action-rules are located within a scientific conceptual structure, but concepts always have a motive at their heart which can be realised only insofar as the person is able to recognise the appropriate stimuli and respond with the appropriate action.
The actual concept which the seasoned professional has mastered, merges both paths of development, both scientific and everyday concepts. It is this merging of everyday and scientific knowledge that is the trainee’s experience. A trainee who lacks sound everyday interpersonal abilities and is unable to read the situation when they meet a pupil, patient, or client is unlikely to become a good professional even if they have a good foundation in formal scientific knowledge.
The stimuli which have been acquired in a formal setting are not present in the work situation. The subject’s formal knowledge must be worked over and new stimuli acquired in the only way possible; while acting in their professional capacity with real patients, real clients, or in real classrooms. In this way, a new mode of action is constructed alongside the existing formal mode of action acquired in the university setting — professional action in the workplace.
When a person decides to study and takes up a job in that profession, their ideal of that profession takes up the primary position in the structure of their personality, at least while they are at work. As such, it functions as the key component of their identity. That initial ideal may be a thin abstraction based on the image of a family member or fictional character. It will also be a highly conditional ideal because the person is not yet able to say, “I am a professional.” The question is: how does their personality develop to the point when they are able to say, “I am a professional” and all those around them affirm that claim, and they survive the ‘trainee dilemma’?
The process of development of the personality takes place through a series of perezhivaniya in which the person forms new relationships to their environment (otnosheniya) or ‘commitments’. In the professions, there are two distinct references: the person’s own perception of their performance, and the actions of others signalling their assessment of the person in the profession. Both the self-perception and that of others must affirm the person’s identity as a trained professional for the trainee identity as a professional to be established.
Inevitably, the trainee will make mistakes. While signalling to self and others that the trainee is not yet a professional, failures do not necessarily damage the trainee’s identity. It may act as a spur to learn and do better, but most importantly by experiencing the failed action the trainee is enabled to recognise and overcome that failure in the future. The active supervision and corrective action by more senior professionals in this instance are vital.
The trainee dilemma is a critical phase in professional development, marked by a transition from formal education to practical competence. Examined from at CHAT perspective, we characterise it as the transformation of the trainee’s entire personality rather than mere skill acquisition. Through their interactions with more experienced colleagues and authentic workplace challenges, trainees engage in a dynamic interplay of support and independence that fosters their development. This journey is punctuated by perezhivaniya, intense transformative experiences that integrate personal and professional growth