It is important that young people develop self-determination as they enter into adult life. However,
in practice the mechanism of professional orientation does not provide the reliable choice of their
future profession that is needed and those who provide such guidance need assistance. The article
demonstrates the necessity of using reliable quantitative criteria in evaluating the effectiveness of
professional orientation. It has been suggested that the correlation coefficient can be used and, in
order to verify this assumption, an experiment was designed and conducted. The results confirm the
possibility of using the correlation coefficient as a means of evaluating the effectiveness of professional
orientation.