Academic mobility (AM) development is determined by dynamism of pedagogical profession, its permanent changes according to national and world tendencies of higher school reforms and requirements to a competitive specialist at the market of educational services. Scientific literature explains a concept of "university staff AM" as a social motive of their professional development and also views it as a process of professional performing, development of new competences, personal and professional skills in conditions of global education area; modern condition of effective professional development and socialization of university staff on different stages of professionalization; a new personality structure (Barblan, 2002; Baron, 2000;  Bhandary, 2009; Byram, 2008; Cradden, 2008; Laughlin, 2009; Webster, 2007 and others). Modern investigation of university lecturers’ professionalism includes their capacity for flexibility and reflection, adequate self-esteem, readiness for life-long self-education and self-development. Structural-functional analysis of university staff АМ distinguishes its components: purposefull, semantic, organizational, evaluational and functional. АМ functions on personal, social, professional and educational levels and is considered to be an important social and personal motive of university staff personal and professional development. Consequently AM development appears to become one of the major motives of the process of professional and personal self-realization of modern university teaching staff. Staff readiness for АМ is based on self-confidence in their personal strengths and abilities, courage to move from one point of development to another, from lower level of mastership to higher one, obtaining and independent production of new knowledge and skills, acquirement of new experience and converting all these into new motives and skills of personality. AM is a criterion of quality and modernity of each national higher education system. Researchers define mobility as an extraordinary important thing for global education area development which is enriched by contributions of different national education schools and cultures (Kyvik, 2012). Prague Communiqué (2001) mentioned that mobility allows both students and lecturers to use all the wealth of European higher education area including democratic values, diversity of cultures, languages and systems of higher education. AM is perceived as an ability of university academicians to move from one higher educational establishment to another. Joint educational and research programs could not develop beyond lecturers’ mobility (Byram & Dervin, 2008). Psychologists view mobility as a characteristic of personality which has complex multi-component structure (openness, activity, plasticity, flexibility, goal-orientation, self-actualization etc) (Danyliuk & Paschenko, 2012). It allows a professional to change both himself/herself and reality on the basis of his/her own aims consciously without destructive tumors in life and professional activity. AM on the one hand is a professionally important quality of a teacher’s personality, but on the other hand – an important dynamic characteristic of his/her scientific-educational activity. During the last few years AM is perceived not only as a characteristic of personality and a feature of higher school teaching staff activity but also as an innovative competence of university lecturers (Silvio, 2003). In spite of given arguments situation with AM of university teaching staff in Ukraine is far from perfect. There are a lot of reasons creating background for such a situation, among them imperfection of legislation which regulates staff mobility, absence of AM strategy at the universities and poor financial support for mobile staff, lack of special training for future university pedagogues, poor foreign languages skills, absence of motivation for lecturers to participate in AM and so on. The aim of our research was connected with collection, analysis and interpretation of empirical data concerning intensity of Ukrainian academicians’ AM in order to define psychological and pedagogical peculiarities of their professional activity and development in conditions of modern transformational education environment.

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