Several so-called “manual” professions suffer from a negative image. “Underjobs”, Unattractive, painful, poorly paid, ghettos of underprivileged students, “default” professional choice … However, some young people who undertake these jobs, push their search for mastery, perfection and excellence until becoming national champions or Olympic champions (“WorldSkills competition”) in their profession. The origin of their motivation is off great interest for us. They have talent, will, or luck but that does not explain their motivation to succeed. We chose to study the origin of their ambition.
Ambition, often equated with motivation, has been little studied so far and remains largely unknown. We propose here to study the psychological and social factors of professional ambition by a study conducted with members of the French team engaged in the Olympics games of professions. For this, we used an autobiographical approach, involving the analysis of life stories and cognitive mapping. First of all, this method allowed us to examine to what extent the support offered by WorldSkills constitutes both a “path of excellence in learning” and a powerful tool of professionalization for these young people. In a second step, we analyzed the psychological dimensions of their professional ambition.