THE SYSTEM-COMPETENCE APPROACH AS AN INNOVATIVE CONCEPT FOR BUILDING PROFESSIONAL TRAINING PROGRAMS FOR SPECIALISTS

Abstract

The integration of domestic higher professional education into a new competence-oriented reality has not yet brought the dividends that are expected from this. In some areas, the transition to competence-based education has only worsened the situation and causes rejection by the professional pedagogical community. Periodically, there are calls to return to the previous, albeit outdated, but more understandable ZUN paradigm. Comparing the definition of the concept of “competence” in the works of Russian ideologists of competence-oriented education, the author comes to the conclusion that professional competence, in addition to their proposed definitions, can be considered as (1) a phenomenon that can be observed in the conditions of performing tasks of professional activity; and (2) an emergent property of the system formed by a complex of professional competencies formed in the process of professional training. Moving along this logical trajectory, the author formulates a question that he had not previously found in research in this field: “What are the professional competencies of a competent specialist?”; “Is it possible to form a set of didactic guidelines for a specialist’s competence outside of a systematic study of the specifics of his professional activity?”. In modern realities, the competence models of a specialist, embedded as didactic guidelines in existing educational programs, are far from always provided with appropriate studies of the predicted professional activity of graduates, which gives rise to unsystematic complexes of professional competencies that are unable to ensure the stable emergence of the phenomenon of competence after graduation. The inconsistency of the competence-based approach in domestic vocational education in its current interpretation is obvious. This leads the author to the conclusion that it is necessary to develop an innovative system-competence approach as a methodological basis for vocational education, based on the synthesis of the competence concept and the fundamental provisions of the general theory of systems.