PROFESSIONAL AND PERSONAL FORMATIONS AT VARIOUS STAGES OF SOCIAL WORKERS’ PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The paper aims to highlight the essence of social workers' personality development and to carry out an empirical research of professional and personal formations emerging at various stages of social work experts' professional devel-opment. In order to reach the goal, the following basic theoretical and methodological approaches to the issue of per-sonal development have been reviewed: psychodynamic, behavior and cognitive, existence and humanistic, activity, subject and deed, genetic and design, acmeological, axiological, reflexive, etc. The personal development term is inter-preted ambiguously by scientists, as they are focused on different issues of this phenomenon (formation, development, regulation, etc.). The empirical research involved 625 social work experts living in different regions of Ukraine being at different stages of professional development. The following research methods have been applied: psychodiagnostic methods for studying components and formations of the respondents' personal development, an author's inventory of incomplete sentences, mathematical methods (correlation, dispersion and factor analysis). Statistical data processing was performed using SPSS (23.0 version). It has been found that most respondents' professional and personal for-mations level is below average. Statistically significant differences between social workers' personal development level and their gender, place of residence, work experience, etc. have been revealed. It has been found that the female social work experts' personal development indicators are higher than those of the male respondents. Besides, the city social work experts have higher indicators of personal development as compared to those living in the country. The peculiari-ties of personal development of the social workers according to the work experience have shown its positive and dy-namic nature.