PROFESSIONAL INFORMATION CENTRE ACTIVITY IN GYMNASIUMS: INFORMATION PROVISION ANALYSIS AND PROBLEMS

Professional information and consultation services, provided effectively are the most important teaching and occupation policy element at the national, regional and local levels, also a constituent part of active labour market policy. The aim of Professional information centres (PIC) is to provide qualitative information about the world of professions, to encourage self cognition, to help making a decision which profession to choose while projecting one's career, to provide parents and pedagogues with necessary information and support. New professional information and consultation service provision tendencies having formed, the demand of obtaining virtual information is getting more urgent for a contemporary man. Therefore, PIC internet cafes' informativeness and provided information conformance to consumer demands are analysed in this research. The research is based on objectivism, which requires neutrality, indifference from social sciences and researchers, fact registration without their social, political evaluation. The authors keep the position, that the research based on objectivism accepts social information as objective information about really existing phenomena and processes. Analysing information in gymna-sium internet cafes about PIC activity, qualitative approach dominates, i.e. interpretive paradigm which harmoniously matches with normative paradigm. Data for the research were collected between September and December, 2011. The information about accredited PIC activity was selected from 76 gymnasium internet cafes. In order to analyse research data, measures of descriptive statistics (absolute and percen-tage frequencies) are applied. Analysing research data, repetition frequencies of categories PIC link in the internet menu bar, PIC localisation place, PIC working hours, people participating in PIC activity, responsibilities of people participating in gymnasium PIC activity, aims and tasks of PIC activity, PIC cooperation, PIC consultations, PIC activity forms for students, PIC activity forms for students' parents, PIC methodological help for class teachers, PIC methodological support for subject teachers, PIC information spread were measured. The obtained results allowed to identify, what information about PIC activity is provided in gymnasium internet cafes, the problems of its provision in virtual space and to create recommendatory universal PIC activity provision model, adapted for providing information in gymnasium internet site.