The article presents the problem of formation of competences of students of higher educational institutions. Professional competence is recommended to form independent work on the example of technical universities. The author describes the essence of the concepts of «competence», «competency building approach». This article describes the approaches, based on which the study was conducted: personal and activity. Evaluation of the effectiveness of competences is considered taking into account motivational-value, cognitive, operationally -efficient and reflective-evaluative components.