Communicative Competence as a Component of the Professional Development of Psychology Students

Abstract

The paper analyzes the issue of communicative competence as an element of the professional development of students studying psychology. It is established that in order to become a professional psychologist, a person should possess a number of essential psychological skills, such as communicative competence realized in the possession of verbal and nonverbal means of communication, ability to initiate and maintain contact. Based on this, the aim of the article was to conduct an empirical study on the communicative competence features as a component of the professional development of upcoming psychologists. A set of psychodiagnostic methods was selected, which helped to study the main parameters of communicative competence, features of professional orientation and motivation of future professional activity. The obtained results were subjected to quantitative and qualitative analysis. The sample included 72 Bachelor’s degree psychology students studying at Vasyl’ Stus Donetsk National University. The research consisted of two stages. The first stage incorporated the assessment of communicative competence, based on which the sample of subjects was divided into 3 subgroups according to their level of communicative competence development. The second stage analyzed the features of professional motivation and attitude to one’s own professional development of psychology students with different levels of communicative competence development. The results demonstrate that students with a high level of communicative competence in comparison with students with medium and low levels of communicative competence in the structure of professional motivation are dominated by intrinsic motivation, which indicates that for such students their future profession itself is very important. Moreover, these students have a clear idea of their future professional activity, are more professionally oriented, which will contribute to their successful professional development.