The article examines the advantages and disadvantages of the individually-oriented and group variants of the educational process; a comparative analysis is conducted in the time interval covering the Soviet and post-Soviet periods of work of universities. It is shown that some elements of group preparation no longer correspond to the trends of the times, and an individually-oriented version of training does not guarantee graduate competence established by the requirements of the educational standard. A variant of a reasonable balance between the well-known organizational forms of training in university is suggested. As a criterion for the degree of competence formation, the authors see the actual quality of the graduate's training, their ability to successfully deal with the tasks from the field of their future professional activity. To do this, it is important to enable students to influence the development of their educational trajectories in a meaningful way by deciding on the ratio of contact and independent work as well as on the ratio of individual sessions to stream-group ones. Аn example of the organizational structure of a training course, discipline and a module is given. It will ensure a greater degree of freedom for a teacher and student in combining classroom and extracurricular forms of study and independent work of the student.