Social and age norms in the professional context

The relevance of research of professional norms consists in the need of their studying for understanding the whole picture of mental development of a person in the period of maturity. Earlier the given problem was not properly highlighted in the scientific works on psychology. The present research is devoted to the analysis of empirical results of social and age norms in the professional context, i.e. to those social instructions which condition the contents and the course of professional activity of a person at concrete age stages. The research is aimed at the detection of the social and age norms features determining the professional development of a personality. The research was conducted within the frames of qualitative methodology. For collecting empirical data the methods of the semi-structured interview and focus groups were used. The processing of the obtained texts was carried out by means of the network thematic analysis. As a result, it was educed that the content of social and age norms in the professional sphere is focused around such thematic units as a place and a role of a profession in human lives, conditions and indicators of successful professional activity, labor-related professional problems of a personality. It is proved that the labor activity in the respondents' consciousness acts as one of the most significant in life. It is also revealed that especially strict norms of professional development are applied to middleaged persons who are obliged to gain certain results in the career, to have the stable income and to pass on the professional experience to the subsequent generations.