Models for identifying career readiness of railway university graduates in the world educational space (theoretical aspect)

The ever-increasing requirements for transport industry employees set the task for Russian railway universities to form their graduates' career readiness that meets international standards. Due to the insufficient clarity of the nature of this interdisciplinary phenomenon in the scientific literature, the study carries out a theoretical analysis of the concept “career readiness”, its structure and comparison with “professional competency”, which made it possible to determine the goals and objectives for the formation of these integrative qualities in the educational process. The author describes three models for identification and evaluation of career readiness, which are used in different countries of the world, and the creation of these models is based not only on national vocational training traditions, but also on the certification of the professional engineers. Based on the study of the employers' approaches to identifying the most required young employees' qualities, a conclusion was made about the priority of key competencies over professional ones and their importance in organizing continuous self-development and professional development of a specialist throughout the entire period of their employment.