Abstract:

Acquisition of professional skills is a very topical issue, especially nowadays, when specialists are constantly forced to extend their knowledge and improve their professional skills. Recent decades have been characterized by significant changes in the approach to professional education. The main reason for this is the environment in which today´s specialists work and continue in their education. This environment is always becoming more changeable, more demanding and more critical of possible mistakes, and therefore the emphasis is put on constant education in all its forms: formal, non-formal and informal.

The authors of the contribution focussed on professional education of the following groups:
- academic workers in tertiary education,
- doctors in the field of healthcare,
- university-educated hotel managers in the hotel sector.

These groups were divided into two sub-groups according to the length of their working experience. The first sub-group included people with working experience up to three years, who are at the beginning of their careers, and experience intensive professional education. The second sub-group consisted of workers with more than twenty years of working experience, are at the top of their careers, and who still improve in their jobs.

The research deals with certain methods of professional education, their usefulness for acquiring professional skills, the influence of the length of practice on the quality of professional education, and other factors affecting the work quality and effectiveness of academic workers, doctors and hotel managers. The main research objectives were to identify the methods influencing the acquisition of professional skills by doctors, academics and hotel managers in regard of their working practices, to compare results among these three professions to determine the most beneficial methods of education, and the possibility of their use in practice. Research results, processed statistically, are a part of the contribution.

Keywords:

Professional education, occupational skills, working experience, length of practice, methods of professional education.