The urgency of the given problem is caused by the necessity to develop an innovative education system capable of producing highly qualified specialists with a wide range of social and professional activities and broad-based abilities ready for individual operating innovative activities. The article is intended to searching for the ways of scientifically based organization of students' individual work which is one of the most up-to-date area of a pedagogical research (focus), contributing to the development of professional competencies and the optimization of higher technical education. The leading method of the given problem research is the pedagogical experiment, which makes it possible to identify, theoretically substantiate and experimentally test the organizational and pedagogical conditions for the development of professional competencies in the students' individual work. In this research students' individual work is considered as an important pedagogical subsystem of the educational process, built with regard to its essential characteristics on the competency based and learner-centered approaches; at the same time, organizational and pedagogical conditions are realized: subject-subject relations between the teacher and students are built up, the prolonged differential tasks are used in the educational process with their gradual complication from adaptive to developing and constructive in the process of studying the academic disciplines, the development of professional competencies is regularly monitored. The scientific and methodological materials presented in the article, used in the practice of professional education, ensure the development of professional competencies in the individual work of technical university students and streamline the workflow of the institutions of higher professional education improving the quality of education.