View of Secondary Technical School Students on the Paths and Barriers to Their Professional Development

Abstract

Students in the Czech Republic are increasingly interested in secondary school studies with a universal technical focus providing job security and a swift path to retraining according to existing labour market requirements. The aim of the paper is to find out how Czech students of secondary technical schools evaluate their professional development in the course of their secondary school studies. Qualitatively oriented research is focused on the quality of development of the secondary school studies as regarded by the secondary technical school students in the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic. The research outputs provide suggestions for students to improve their professional development throughout the secondary school studies, as well as suggestions for procedures that may help remove the occurrence of barriers in their educational paths to a technically oriented profession. A partial output of the research questionnaire survey is to describe, characterise and evaluate the idea of secondary technical schools’ students about their future profession and the level of their motivation to study at Czech technical secondary schools. Students consider the low number of teaching hours per week for teaching new modern technologies and computer-controlled machines to be a critical external barrier in their professional development. They admit low motivation to learn a large amount of theoretical information, without linking theory with practice. Practical work in workshops belongs among popular subjects.