There is a constant need for graduates who possess the skills that are highly sought by employers and can contribute to successful business development. Successful activity of a specialist is conditioned by two categories of skills: hard and soft skills. When talking about hard skills, we refer to direct technical knowledge. On the opposite, soft skills refer to communication, team work, creativity, problem solving and other personal skills. Experts agree that beside hard (technical) skills, soft (also called people-) skills are necessary. The research presents the basic groups of soft skills an engineer specialist needs for a successful professional activity: basic communication skills, selfmanagement skills, skills of effective thinking, management skills. This paper calls for the development of soft skills through the interdisciplinary form of the educational process in order to increase the employability of graduates. We considered intrapersonal, interpersonal and systemic levels of interdisciplinary students' engagement which are relevant to the soft skills groups. The appropriate organizational form for these skills development is an interdisciplinary project team, which facilitates the acquisition of the soft skills. In other words, it is necessary to imitate working environment in the educational process to equip students with the skills required.

Increased requirements of employers forced researchers to pay attention to the lack of academic knowledge and professional competence, so-called hard skills, when applying for a job. Multitasking has become a defining trend in all professional fields, which confronts professionals with problems that do not have a solution algorithm. We need special mechanisms for adapting the employees to constant challenges and additional knowledge and skills, the function of which is performed by soft skills. This article focuses on the development of creative and critical thinking as one of the categories of soft skills, as it is the style of thinking that determines the level of success in the professional sphere. Today, with the development of the information society, the problem of understanding a large amount of information, its processing, correct interpretation by students and further adaptation for application in professional field is a crucial one. Communication in the field of science and technology is realized in the form of discourse, which actualizes the development of future graduates creative thinking through the ability formation to explicate meaningful content, decode and deverbalize in the process of perceiving, understanding and interpreting professionally relevant information when working with scientific and technical discourse. The discipline of "Foreign Language" provides the necessary environment for developing soft skills working with the discourse in question. In this case reading is a tool for obtaining information by comparison, comparing data, analyzing the information received, highlighting the main and secondary information, establishing causality, assessing. The hermeneutic approach to the development of soft skills ensures the optimal conditions to activate mental operations responsible for effective perception and further adaptation of the information received for professional purposes. Practical part of the research is to compile a set of tasks for working with text material, which will ensure the information understanding and interpretation through certain reading strategies stimulating mental activity.

Currently the relevance of the development of students’ universal competencies (soft skills) along with the formation of their professional (hard skills) skills is determined by employers’ requirements, rapidly changing labor market and terms of professional activity. The article deals with the students of technical majors soft skills developmentin course foreign language instruction. The authors analyze the essence and the concept of soft skills in frames of foreign language university training. The authors highlight that soft skills development occurs through focused and purposeful work on critical, system and analytical thinking skills. A special course of the discipline "Foreign Language" is designed by the authors. The preliminary results of the experimental work demonstrate that positive dynamics of skills development has been observed.

Globalization and innovation have recently resulted in the extensive use of the latest technological products practically everywhere, and in education especially. Various technologies are now employed in different spheres of education. Virtual Reality (VR) is a global innovative technology with great potentials and enormous pedagogical possibilities that offers new methods and techniques for education. The main features of it are visibility, security, involvement, presence and focusing. It enables to combine the computer-generated virtual information and the real environment in real time. The presented VR language program is based on the concept of 3D modeling and semantic frame method.

In the paper the concept of "situation" in a linguistic context is discusses, and is defined as a complex of interrelated events occurring in a particular place and time. The difference between situations and events is explained, thus events are considered as part of the situation. The event structure of the situation is proposed, which includes the composition of its participants (actants) and their role in the interaction that binds them in a given situation, as well as the circonstants. With the help of the frame/script description, a characteristic of such class of situations as a situation of confrontation is proposed.