In accordance with the acting Russian regulations on higher professional education, there are two main concepts: a direction, and a specialty. The educational direction is the large area to which specialist training can be concerned, for example, Thermal Power Engineering, Economics, Radio Engineering. The Russian Educational Standard in each direction contains 1) the obligatory part which is common for all Russian universities and can not be changed; 2) the professional part including the disciplines necessary for the modern education with account of the state-of-the-art in the specific direction; and 3) university part chosen and confirmed by the specific university. The natural science subjects (mathematics, physics, chemistry, social sciences etc.) are included into first group of the disciplines and the curriculums on them are fixed by the common standard: each university must exactly fulfil them. The professional disciplines (for example, electrical machines, thermophysics, electrodynamics, high-voltage technologies etc.) are included into second part of the standard. The third part contains the disciplines, which are developed mostly in the specific university and which are the extremely promising from the point of view of science and technology.
The educational directions are concretized in the specialties the number of which is much more than the number of directions. The specialties, as a rule, correspond the educational area of each department, and are realized by these departments. Approximately, at the third academic year of the Bachelor course the students trained in the same direction are divided into sub-groups on the basis of specialties. Their education begins slightly differ in conformity with the common educational standard. Each specialty orients on more narrow areas of science and technology (for instance, the direction Radio Engineering includes the following specialties: Radio Physics and Electronics; Radio Systems; House-Hold Radio Electronics etc.).