Communicative competence as a component of soft skills of higher education students of IT specialities

Abstract

Today's world puts forward new requirements for specialist training, and soft skills are becoming necessary for modern specialists alongside purely professional skills. Among them, the most important are effective communication skills and communication competence. Interpersonal communication skills are important for future IT professionals, as developers mostly work in teams and effective communication is a pragmatic tool for achieving success in their professional tasks.

The relevance of the study is determined by the need to outline the features of professionally oriented communicative competence of future computer science specialists and the role of innovative technologies in its formation and development. The aim of the publication is to identify the main components of communicative competence as a social skill of IT students and determine effective technologies for its development in a blended learning environment.

To achieve the goal and solve the research objectives, a set of methods was used: study of scientific literature, analysis, synthesis, generalisation and systematisation.

Results. The study analyses various approaches to defining the structure of communicative competence and establishes that the communicative competence of IT students has an integrated interdisciplinary character and consists of professionally oriented language, speech competence, socio-cultural, discursive, strategic competence, which are a prerequisite for successful professional interaction.

Modern pedagogical science emphasises an activity-based, competence-based, pragmatic approach to learning. It is important that IT higher education students have language and speech competence in Ukrainian and English. They should be able to use their language knowledge and communicative skills in specific professional communication situations. Interactive technologies, digital tools and learning platforms are effective in achieving this goal. They make it possible to implement blended learning, which successfully combines individual and group work, traditional forms of learning with distance learning, provides autonomous learning, increases motivation and develops communicative skills relevant to the professional activities of IT specialists.