Criteria and Levels of Professional Competence of Future IT Professionals

The article reveals approaches to determining criteria and indicators for measuring the levels of professional competence of future IT specialists in the conditions of the information and educational environment of a higher education institution. The review of scientific and pedagogical literature on the construction of criterion-indicator systems is carried out and the requirements for their formation are substantiated. It is determined that the criteria must comply with the principles of materiality, consistency, validity, measurability and verifiability. Given the analysis of European educational standards and frameworks (European e-Competence Framework, EQF, CDIO Syllabus, Computing Curricula 2020, etc.), a criterion-indicator system for assessing the professional competence of IT specialists is proposed. The system identifies four criteria: cognitive and content, operational and activity, professional and communicative, and ethical and value. For each criterion, a system of quantitative indicators has been developed that allow diagnosing the level of professional competence. A 5-level scale for assessing professional competence for each indicator and a method for calculating the integral indicator of the level of professional competence are presented. In accordance with the e-CF scale, the levels of professional competence from performing tasks under supervision (e-1) to initiating innovations (e-5) are substantiated. The proposed system is the basis for further pedagogical measurements within the framework of an experimental study of the influence of educational factors on the formation of professional competence of future IT specialists.