The significance of the paper is due to the importance of academic mobility in human capital accumulation that ensures the future competitiveness of specialists in the world labor market. Nowadays, academic mobility is growing and the number of students studying at European universities is constantly increasing, including students of Russian universities. The paper aims to assess the importance of students' academic mobility, its diversity, and the main determining factors underlying academic mobility. The paper shows the formation of competitiveness in the global market, gives an example of preparing the future engineers for academic mobility for French universities. Thanks to this training, students enter French universities as part of the scholarship programs of the Republic of Tatarstan and the Embassy of France in Russia. The attractiveness of French universities is accounted for by the French government policy to attract foreign students, the quality of education, geographical diversity, a variety of majors, low tuition fees, the opportunity of finding a job after internship, etc. The paper also shows the skills and knowledge acquired by the future engineers who have been trained for academic mobility. The paper notes that students who have studied abroad and returned to their country are generally more competitive in the labor market than those who have studied at only one university, since they have a set of characteristics, such as depth of professional knowledge, initiative, creativity, work experience, goal commitment.