Abstract:

It is currently very common to find students that begin their higher education at a university level and during the first courses rethink their academic future, thus abandoning the university studies and undertaking professional middle or higher grade training courses due to several circumstances.

It is true that Professional Training has gained prestige since its change in perspective, mainly due to the good employability ratios with these types of degrees, the flexibility of the training cycles and their entailment to the university sphere in matters of subject equivalence. This is why students consider engaging in these types of cycles as very good alternative within the European higher education scope.

There are many reasons for student mobility which we could summarize into three: economic reasons, lack of knowledge or understanding of the university studies (creating false hopes), or the inability to cope with the proposed contents. All of these have in common the demotivation and a feeling of personal insecurity.

Orientation should be a guided process all along our student’s academic life, and not only be restricted to specific situations at the end of a stage. In this way, students that are finishing their mandatory studies should be asked to develop a personal professional project which should be assessed every year in order to bring it closer to the reality they are living. This will allow the student’s decision making process to stem from their real needs and not from a personal wish in a given moment.

Maybe one of the main reasons students fail to find their professional path is the lack of orientation labor at the end of their mandatory education. We consider that many of these failures could be avoided if there were an adequate personal reflection guided by a professional in the field.

In this article, we will evaluate the various reasons why students desert their university studies and consider if they could have been avoided with proper academic orientation. We will also look upon the possibility of developing a professional personal project for students of 3ª and 4º year of mandatory higher education in order to avoid these situations and favor students to become protagonists and accountable for the decision making in their professional career.

Keywords:

Professional Training, Academic and professional orientation, Personal professional Project.