Abstract:

The role of IT in modern life can’t be overestimated. It is the basis of modern technologies and modern society. The success of each sphere of human activity depends on its inclusion in modern information technologies. The IT professions are regarded as highly transformational. Depending on the IT sphere hard skills tend to become obsolete within 1-5 years. Keeping a pulse on the industry is a key soft skill that helps to get a leg up on competition. Thus IT professions demand constant professional development, hard skill updating through training and self-education. For this reason it seems important to investigate key factors in educational motivation of IT specialists. We studied differences in motivation, basic needs and professional identity between male and female, professional grades (junior, middle and senior) and types of employment (full-time employees and freelancers). The sample consisted of 69 IT specialists (31 men and 38 women) recruited from a computer software company in Moscow: 52% respondents were freelancers, 48% full-time employees. Among respondents were junior graded specialists (26%), middle graded specialists (42%) and senior specialists (32%). We used following methods: Diagnostics of educational motivation (A.A.Rean and V.A.Yakunin), Academic Motivation Scale (T.O. Gordeeva, O.A. Sycheva, E.N. Osina), Professional Identity (L.B. Schneider), Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction Scales (BPNSS) (M. Gagne, adapted Russia by I. Yu. Suvorova, A. A. Babiy, N. V. Korzun). Male tend to have higher need in competence than female. Female tend to have higher cognitive educational motivation than male. The competence and autonomy needs increase from grade to grade. Juniors have higher external educational motivation than middles. Key differences were found between freelancers and full-time employees. The former are distinguished by a higher communication, professional, self-realization, cognitive, social educational motives, cognitive, achievement, self-development and self-respect academic motivation and relatedness needs. The full-time employees have higher lack of motivation in education, although it corresponds to the low level. Therefore, it is necessary to develop special motivation measures and training strategies for full-time employees taking into account the received data.

Keywords:

educational motivation, basic professional needs, IT specialists, professional identity.