Building the digital competence of future vocational education specialists: a conceptual model and conditions for its implementation

Abstract

Introduction and purpose. The digital transformation of the labour market requires digital competence from future vocational education and training (VET) specialists, whereas the pedagogical practice of preparing such specialists mostly relies on separate technological solutions without an integral didactic instrumentarium that would combine them into a system. The purpose of the article is to substantiate an original structural-functional model of building the digital competence of future VET specialists, to define the principles of its construction, the pedagogical conditions of its implementation, and the criteria for diagnosing the outcome. Brief description of the main findings. On the basis of an analysis of 24 sources, a three-level structure of the digital competence of a VET specialist is clarified - transversal, professional-pedagogical, and occupation-specific levels – and six principles of model construction are formulated: didactic priority, functional correspondence, cyclical feedback, differentiation by occupational specificity, risk preventiveness, and contextual adaptability. A structural-functional model is proposed with five interrelated components – target, content, technological, organisational-methodological, and diagnostic; six pedagogical conditions for its implementation in Ukrainian VET institutions and four criteria of digital-competence formation with level-based indicators are defined. Summary. The proposed model shifts the emphasis from a list of separate technologies to the didactic mechanism of their integration, in which the digital-didactic competence of the teacher is the system-forming variable. The model is conceptual in status and requires further empirical validation against indicators of graduates’ professional performance.