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ESTONIAN YOUTH WORKERS? PROFESSIONALITY: YOUTH CENTERS DIRECTORS? AND YOUTH FIELD COORDINATORS? OPINIONS

Maarika Veigel

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the issues of youth workers’ professionality which are given as the priority by European Commission in 2015. Non-formal education must more efficiently support formal education. For youth workers, this has created, in particular new challenges and difficulties (such as a lack of professional scenes), but also opportunities. During the period 2005-2017 various studies showed the high mobility of Estonia youth workers in youth centers and shortage of personnel with special education. The purpose of this research is to bring to the light youth centers directors’ and youth field coordinators’ opinions of youth workers’ professionality. The theoretical framework of the study creates Evans, Devlin and Loogma concepts of professionality. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 Estonian youth centers directors and counties’ youth field coordinators. Intervieewers described their opinions on the following question areas: profession choice and becoming a specialist; the important aspects and changes in the daily work of youth workers in the context of professionality; meanings in youth workers’ work life; coping with daily work; necessary skills/competencies; opinions about youth field in the future. The results show that profession choice was often rather radom, but most of intervieewers learned youth work(higher education) and have working experience mostly more than 10 years. The study highlights a number of aspects: the need to boost support to the youth workers’ professional development; analyze more the content and roles of everyday work; focused on the development of a novice youth workers and prevent burnout; to create more innovation in youth work; fairer and better distribution of resources. It concerned the needs for developing reflection and problem-solving skills and to enhance cooperation. This is the second part of a combined analysis of the study.

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