DEVELOPMENT OF SOFT SKILLS OF FUTURE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PROFESSIONALS: METHODS, MEANS, EVALUATION INDICATORS

Abstract

This article proposes a soft skills framework. Successful employment of IT graduates in the IT industry depends essentially on the level of soft skills. Five soft skills groups are proposed: management, communication, personal effectiveness, strategic management and information management. Each group contains a specific list of skills and competencies that a graduate of the university's IT profession should possess. Indicators were developed to measure the level of soft skills development and a rating scale was proposed. A model for forming and developing the soft skills of future IT professionals has been developed. It includes: target, procedural, substantive-methodological, technological and diagnostic-resultant components. According to the developed model, the stages of formation of "soft skills" for future IT-specialists are grounded: preparatory (formation of communication and management skills), professional (skills of personal efficiency), integral (skills of strategic management, personal efficiency and information management). Content, methods, forms, cloud tools and services are defined for each stage. The effectiveness of the application of blended learning technology, which combines the use of project methodology, forms of individual and group work with the use of cloud tools for the implementation of collective and individual projects, is substantiated. In the course of the pedagogical experiment, soft skills were identified, the effectiveness of the developed model of software development of skills was proved. Soft skills, the level of development of which is most intensively explored, are explored. These are soft skills such as: understanding your own responsibility to the team while working on a project, being able to present the project to investors or your own team, working with colleagues and performing tasks independently, clearly formulating their needs and expectations for the team and the environment, the ability to unite the group and build effective team interaction to solve certain tasks, to form a communication system in the team using answers other cloud services, the ability to plan long-term based on the intermediate goals of the project, the willingness to delegate its authority to other team members, the ability to quickly identify important and minor, solve problems more effectively, more carefully and efficiently handle different tasks.