Technology Assessment as a Field of Professional Competency of Technoscience Society Engineers

The article is devoted to the competency model analysis of a technical university graduate and its compliance for the technoscience society. Due to the transition to the society of technoscience, we may notice the shift toward requirements for the future technical specialist in conditions of the society’s ongoing digital transformation. Central technoscience drivers are information and communication technologies, Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data. The paper focuses on the fact that modern engineer is in demand for the development, design, and manufacture of industrial products and sophisticated social engineering systems. Along with technical and technological optimality, organizational and managerial rationality, and economic efficiency, their development must necessarily include an extensive socio-humanitarian component the human dimension itself. In the digital space, a modern specialist should be able to model and calculate the impact of new technology on a person, their living conditions, environment, social risks and possible consequences of the complex high-tech systems operation. According to the authors’ research and a wide range of evidence, the paper shows that the modern labor market is already demonstrating these trends through changes in the role behavior of an engineer in the new economy requirements. An engineer’s competence model must necessarily include a whole set of social knowledge and skills to contribute to its effective integration into modern high-tech digital technologies. An engineer of the new digital reality must recognize social foundations and social conditionality development of complex technical systems and technologies. He should also be able to identify the problem area in the interaction of nature, technology, and humanity, apply standard analysis procedures to the problems of this interaction, find ways to overcome these problems, and possess methods of analysis and risk forecasting.