Management of professional orientation development at university

The author not only presents the experience of organizing professional orientation activities at Petrozavodsk State University but also attempts at describing the technology of managing change process in this area of university life and its practical implementation. The aim of the article is to identify methods of improving education quality at a "ground" level of working with future students, define challenges and perspectives for university managerial activities in the field of early professional orientation of trainees. The article looks into real examples of planning and introducing changes in the content and form of professional orientation. In the beginning of the article the author presents general characteristic of existing practices of interaction between universities and prospective students and demonstrates that basically their efforts are aimed at information and advertising activities and rendering paid services in the field of pre university training for future students. But such approach does not fully meet the requirements of improving student quality. The authors demonstrate that Petrozavodsk State University effectively solves this task by means of merging professional orientation and pre university training into a single process. Project methodology and in professional orientation at the university is shown. A lot of attention in the arti- cle is paid to developing content and forms of university and school interaction. The author provides characteristics of main factors and problems related to organizing enrollment process that influence student enrollment results and quality. The need for sociological research into quality contents of future students and their motivation as the basic instrument for designing managerial measures and professional orientation activities analysis for further managerial decisions is supported. The article also looks into university communication in the educational environment and describes forms of interaction between university and school, university and teacher community, university and supplementary education institutions. The authors analyses introducing network interaction forms into the process of implementing supplementary educational programs. The author believes that desire to improve current end future performance of students can be a defining motive in the partnership between university and school. The scope of the article is broad enough: besides describing experience of organizing professional orientation activities the author presents university management practice using the example of organizing school and student unions. The article demonstrates managerial activities taken by the university in order to form sustainable interest among students to engineering specializations and forming necessary competencies for working in hi tech industries. In the conclusion the author states that professional orientation activities of the university present a complex multifac-tor process requiring modern university management methods.