The paper expounds the results of a theoretical and practical research on the significance of presence of emotional intelligence in the manager's professiogram. The research aim is to ascertain the role of emotional intelligence in the manager's professiogram in the 21st century. To foster economic development and global competiveness in Latvia, it is necessary to promote quantitative and qualitative growth of innovative enterprises. To make an innovative enterprise perform successfully, the modern management theory and practice have set forth new requirements for enterprise managers - to develop an ability to be a manager-leader themselves. The manager-leader professiogram has to include competencies forming emotional intelligence. The results of a pilot research revealed that students studying the speciality of management and business (at Latvia University of Agriculture) have a quite low self-evaluation for several competencies of their emotional intelligence; besides, an even lower evaluation is awarded by study fellows and group members. Along with studying theoretical aspects of communication, self-cognition, and self-management, the study process for new specialists of management and business has to be arranged in a way that it promotes practical development and use of EI competencies.

Music schools in Latvia provide pupils with musical education both in the towns and rural areas of Latvia. Studies include instrumental playing, history of music, and music theory lessons. An actual pedagogical problem at the time is activation of pupils' learning. Self-regulated learning acquires significant meaning for pupils' future life. A way of helping pupils' self-regulation in learning is differentiation of learning methods and forms. The aim of the paper is to research the meaning of music schools' ensemble work (collective performance) for enhancing pupils' self-regulated learning. Learning is a process where an individual inherits accumulated experience of the society acquires skills, knowledge, attitudes, enhances his experience, individually and responsibly working and discovering himself, nature and society. Learning as an activity is based on learning experience. According to L.S. Vygotsky's theory of learning, the cultural development depends upon social interaction. The use of ensemble work (collective performance) in school as a form of learning activity and method observes a reciprocal movement towards didactic goal, includes the components of due learning contents (knowledge, skills, instrumental playing experience, attitudes), the results of learning process and its evaluation. Analysis of the obtained data shows that music teachers choose ensemble work as method and form of teaching to indirectly influence the self-regulated learning of pupils, whereas the pupils do not fully understand the significance of ensemble work for enhancing self-regulated learning techniques.

The first independent career related decisions are made during the ninth grade of the elementary school when the further educational institution is selected. The concept of possible selves can be used in career education to help students increase self-awareness, explore and generate options, and formulate plans to achieve future goals. The aim of the article is to examine rural adolescents’ ability to generate career-related possible selves and plausible strategies to attain these possible selves. On the basis of the Possible Selves Theory, the open-ended measure was developed by the author. The pilot research was carried out in Latvia in January 2013. Forty six nine-graders from two rural elementary schools and two rural secondary schools participated in the research. Next year and adult possible selves generated by rural adolescents include such domains as education, employment, leisure activities, physical and personal development, as well as interpersonal relationships and lifestyle. The most important ones are domains of education and employment. Statistically significant differences of the results among the gender subgroups are not found in the research, statistically significant differences exist between the possible selves and their attaining strategies generated by rural secondary school students and rural elementary school students.

Academic staff of higher education institutions has to extend students’ vision and promote their variability of views on competitiveness in order to promote prospective hospitality managers’ competitiveness. The aim and goal of academic activities of the university teaching staff is to search for appropriate or relevant means and provide the necessary conditions to foster the students’ thinking and understanding of the concept of ‘competitiveness’ according to a new paradigm of this notion. The pedagogical experiment was carried out at the Latvia University of Agriculture. The aim of the study was to promote the opinions’ change regarding the notion of prospective hospitality managers’ competitiveness; the developed competitiveness self-assessment method was used as a pedagogical tool. The results of the research (the concluding statistics of the Wilcoxon test and the Sign Test) show that the students’ opinions regarding the notion of prospective hospitality managers’ competitiveness have significantly changed before and after their competitiveness self-assessment. Thus the theoretically grounded method of competitiveness self-assessment approved by students and experts, including a questionnaire of the students’ survey, significantly extended the students’ vision as a pedagogical tool influencing the opinions regarding competitiveness notion among representatives of the prospective hospitality managers’ profession.

Rapid technology development has had an evident impact on the financial sector during the last eight years. The financial sector experiences changes and it is important for the contemporary financial organizations to set a sustainable business perspective through competency management to ensure competitiveness. The current paper additionally focusses on fintech. Information technology development and competency management are the basis of the research. Authors of this research performed literature review to clarify the technology management competency model proposed by Doggett, McGee and Scott (2013) with the purpose of customizing the model for finance and technology knowledge-intensive fintech companies.

One of the modern education problems being investigated is a phenomenon of student procrastination and minimisation of its influence on achievement of career goals. A transformative pedagogical experiment was carried out involving 1st year engineering students of Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies during the 2018/2019 academic year. The aim of the transformative pedagogical experiment was to promote the reduction of student procrastination levels and achievement of their goals by practical experimental approbation of a career education program. During the experiment, self-evaluation of student procrastination was performed before and after the implementation of the career education program. The methodology included 20 indicators of procrastination self-evaluation. The program included three topic-based parts: 1) understanding and setting student career goals; 2) defining procrastination levels and factors; 3) the influence of procrastination minimisation on career goals’ achievement. The study results allowed to conclude that due to the career education program elaborated and implemented in practice, substantial changes in student procrastination self-evaluation took place during the transformative pedagogical experiment. There was a significant difference in student procrastination levels before and after the transformative pedagogical experiment. The study results demonstrated that the elaborated and experimentally implemented career education program is valid and can be further used for minimisation of student procrastination, it can contribute to career goals’ achievement and for the reduction of early discontinuation of studies and dropping out of university as there is a correlation between procrastination and dropout phenomena.

Professional self-determination is an important issue for anyone in the course of a lifetime. The dynamic nature of modern social and economic circumstances makes the issue even more topical. It determines the necessity to improve the career development support system currently existing in the field of education, where various specialists, by purposeful and systematic cooperation, help students in setting their career goals, understating the changeable working environment, seeing various alternatives and making deliberate career decisions. The career support is important as it helps learners choose a suitable professional sphere, profession and educational institution for continuation of their self-improvement upon acquiring of general secondary education. The aim of the research is to provide a scientific basis for topicality of career guidance implementation in school educational environment in order to promote the students’ professional self-determination. In Latvia, a number of career development guidance systems, including counselling and student career support methods and forms are being created and approbated in the educational environment, focusing on the career support curriculum and principles, which would ensure a purposeful implementation of students’ professional self-determination at schools.