The use of the competence approach in education, the internationalization of the educational environment requires an understanding of the students' attitude to the formed competencies, the peculiarities of the formation of professional identity in the process of study and the factors influencing this. All these phenomena are directly related to the educational motivation of future specialists. The paper examines the ideas of undergraduate students of different courses from Russia and China in the field of personnel management about the importance and degree of formation of their general professional competencies in accordance with the Federal State Educational Standard for Higher Education, and examines the features of professional identity. It was noted that the influence of cultural characteristics and mentality on the students' opinion about the significance and degree of formation of certain competencies exceeded the influence of the duration of the training. The limitations of the method of determining the level of self-competence based on self-assessments are indicated. Recommendations are given for the organization of the educational process, taking into account the found patterns.