Social competence of railway transport specialists

Railway transport is the leader of the Russian transport market and one of the largest companies in the global transport sector. This powerful tool not only serves as a driving force for the development of many industries in the Russian Federation, but is also one of the criteria for assessing well-being and welfare of its citizens, which dictates the need for a detailed study of all aspects of the functioning of railway production. When considering the quality of the implementation of railway services, special attention must be paid to the internal quality system, namely, corporate culture, working conditions, quality of service, and a multi-level team management system. In modern rapidly changing socio-technological conditions of development of the transport industry, the efficiency and competitiveness of a railway transport specialist is determined not only by the quality of knowledge and skills in the structure of professional competencies, but also by a set of personal qualities that allow optimal ergonomic passage through the stages of socio-technological adaptation and further professionalization. A multifactorial analysis of “social competence” as a pedagogical category, from the standpoint of activity-based, personal, subjective, axiological, competence-based approaches, the study of regulatory documentation and conditions for the implementation of professional activities in transport, made it possible to determine the essence and structure of the social competence of railway specialists as an integrative quality of personality, the structure of which can be represented by a set of motivational, value, emotional, and communicative components. The choice of indicators (social initiative and activity, the ability to transmit generally accepted and intra-industry social values, empathy, tolerance, self-esteem, ability for effective communication, social mobility) in the structure of social competence is substantiated and the levels of their formation are determined. Situational and functional approaches to identifying the content of the main stages of socialization in the professional training of railway transport specialists made it possible to specify the psychological and pedagogical conditions for the targeted formation of indicators of social competence: incessancy and continuity in the development of a block of socially oriented disciplines; practice-oriented educational process; active learning methods; design technologies; formation of an active subject position of students.