Formation of supra-professional competencies sought in special economic development zones in graduates of technical universities

Abstract

The problem and goal. Modern economy needs engineers having necessary competencies, able to impart a positive impetus to the development of further competitiveness of enterprises located in Priority Social and Economic Development Areas (PSEDA) and throughout entire Russia. The technical higher educational institutions face the mission to secure not only full-value professional training of engineering personnel, but also retraining of the existing specialists within a short time. The purpose of the article is to substantiate the efficiency of the adaptive organisational/pedagogical system of supplementary professional education aimed at developing trainees’ supra-professional competencies within the system of supplementary professional education. Materials and methods. The study involved 146 various-level top managers of PSEDA resident enterprises and 840 persons who were trained under 19 supplementary professional programmes at 43 advanced training courses structured in accordance with the educational services plan of the Centre for supplementary professional education (SPE). The development of trainees’ supra-professional competencies was monitored through observation, questioning and interviewing. The Likert satisfaction scale was used to analyse the collected data. Results. It was established that employers highly appreciate supra-professional competencies as a necessary component of specialist’s qualification characteristics. Following the survey results, it was revealed that 83 % of specialists out of 1000 interviewed persons had not attended any courses of supplementary professional education over the previous 5 years. The efficiency of personnel retraining was determined by analysing the changes in the company’s performance, based on the results of interviewing the employers; the growth of quantitative and qualitative indicators was 62% in 2018, 74% in 2019 and 93% in 2020. Discussion and conclusion. The components of the adaptive organisational/pedagogical system proposed by the authors made it possible to increase the efficiency of educational activities in the system of supplementary professional education, which was confirmed by a pedagogical experiment. The efficiency was determined through numerical measurement tools allowing accurate diagnostics of the experiment participants’ success.