The potential of scientific and education complex for development of future engineers' professional competency in the age of digitalization

Statement of the problem. Digital transformations of the leading industries result in the growing demand of the largest national employers for competent engineering workforce. The need to execute the order of the State, society and employers to train engineers of a new formation focuses industry corporations and technical universities interrelated through education and scientific activities on formation of an integrative resource potential to achieve the strategic goal that is the development of future engineers' professional competency. The purpose of the article is to propose a mechanism for interaction between the participants of the industry- related scientific and education complex providing the formation and implementation of its integrative resource potential for the development of future engineers' professional competency. The research methodology includes the analysis of recent Russian and foreign scientific literature and the questionnaire survey to establish the pedagogical advisability of the proposed mechanism of interaction among the participants in the industry-related scientific and education complex. The survey involved 19 experts including top-managers of transport universities, scientific organizations, and transport manufacturing enterprises, 25 professors and 949 students of technical universities (the survey was conducted in the period of 2015-2019). Research results. The mechanism was proposed of interaction between the participants of the scientific and education complex (education and scientific divisions of an industry-related technical university; manufacturing units of an industry corporation; the founder; national and foreign partner organizations, the knowledge management centre) through the open knowledge base in an ontology format. The results of assessing the views of experts and university professors supported the pedagogical advisability of the mechanism proposed. The data of the students questionnaire showed that with each passing year an ever-larger number of future engineers prefers compressive forms of knowledge representation. Conclusion. In the age of digitalization, the industry- related scientific and education complex has an integrative potential which is transforming into a valuable intangible resource - knowledge under collaboration of students, professors, representatives of science and industry. Being accumulated in the open knowledge base as ontologies, this resource is used for the development of future engineers' professional competency.