Activity approach to the development of professional competence of civil security specialists in postgraduate education (the Ukrainian experience)

Abstract

The practice of developing the professional competence of civil security specialists requires thorough study and experimental confirmation of existing problems. In the study, the authors propose the application of a pedagogical concept for the development of professional competence of civil security specialists in Ukraine, based on an activity approach. In the presented structural-logical scheme, separate elements of the activity approach to the development of professional competence of civil security specialists operate and interact with each other, and also focus on larger contextualizing systems to achieve the target result - the acquisition of new knowledge. The main goal of the study was to compare the level of development of the activity component of the professional competence of specialists in the process of improving their qualifications using educational and cognitive (project training, modeling, performing situational tasks, cases of various types) and practice-oriented (command and staff, object training, analysis of the professional situation, problembased training) teaching methods with the effectiveness of traditional teaching methods, which are based on the informative and illustrative activities of the scientific and pedagogical worker (narration, demonstration, lecture) and reproductive activities of specialists. The unit of analysis is a group of specialists with the appropriate category (for example, heads, deputy heads of structural subdivisions of executive power bodies and local self-government bodies, whose activities are related to the implementation of civil protection measures), who interact to achieve goals that characterize the development of their professional competence in the field of civil security. Based on the obtained results, the authors believe that the activity approach involves better mastering of knowledge, skills, personal and professional qualities by specialists, increasing their activity and motivation to study compared to the use of traditional methods. The authors of the study present their conclusions about the impact of the activity component on the professional competence of specialists, obtained after diagnosing the training process conducted in a higher education institution and institutions of the field of civil security. The presented research used theoretical (analysis and synthesis of research data), empirical (survey, questionnaire, pedagogical experiment, expert evaluation), statistical (quantitative and qualitative analysis) methods and infographics on three levels of development of professional competence of the specified specialists. The results of Pearson's χ2 test confirmed the significance of the differences between the indicators in the groups before and after the experiment at three levels of observation.