The article analyzes the development of competency-based professional training standards and their implementation into educational process in foreign countries. It determines that the main idea of competency-based approach is competency-and-active learning, which aims at complex acquirement of diverse skills and ways of practice activities via mastering respective competences. The article states that competency is the product of competence due to which a person successfully realizes themselves in different spheres of their professional engagement, gains social independence and becomes mobile and qualified. The article also dwells on the international experience of professional and training standards development, it analyses specific internal national, as well as external all-European and worldwide conceptions of professional and training standards development, conceptual foundations of competency-based approach in national higher education within the framework of global information society formation. It highlights specific aspects of standards development based on activity-oriented technologies and professional competence assessment. The article states that within the framework of competency-based teaching and training, quality-assuring actions have to ensure the correspondence of standards and learning outcomes. It informs that the labour market is represented by employers, trade unions and the government. The article explores the fact that in Russia, Ukraine and many other countries the employers and the trade unions do not collaborate to formulate their needs with regard to professional training standards, that is why the government and its administration bodies have to do the task of predicting labour market needs on their own.