Professional education: current condition and new approaches

The article deals with the problems of professional education at the current stage of national economy’s development. The authors attract attention to the difference between the approaches to improving secondary and higher professional education. Government agencies of the highest level focus on improving the system of higher education and labour force training, but training of mid-level specialists has recently fallen out of their sight. Lately a great number of colleges have become part of higher educational institutions. However, during the latest reorganization of the Ministry of Education and Science, which resulted in foundation of the Ministry of Education, secondary professional education fell under the jurisdiction of the latter. The authors suggest uniting secondary and higher professional education into one single system and consider that as higher education. Line engineers will be trained at colleges (even on the basis of basic general education) but probably the term of training will be a little longer due to the fact that colleges are expected to be part of the university structure. Such educational programs could be implemented in regional branches of head universities to provide local industries, small and medium businesses with skilled workforce. The practice of students’ training proved that the division of Bachelors’ and Masters’ competences by the type of their future job is senseless as students do not determine their preferences for future occupation during the period of their studies. The authors suggest developing generalized competence models of graduates. The models could be used to formulate the requirements to the graduates with different level of education. Graduates with professional education will receive diploma together with a supplement containing the list of competences obtained. New Federal State Educational Systems of all levels of higher education read that professional competences are established by an educational institution itself. Therefore, the authors suggest considering issuing university diplomas instead of those of state educational standard.