The development of digital pedagogy requires constant identification of critical competencies in the labor market. It is these competencies that are indicators of the knowledge needed in the training of specialists. Any educational process at the university should be complemented by open educational courses, this will allow you to form individual educational trajectories and flexibly respond to the needs of the labor market. The paper describes an approach to identifying critical competencies in the labor market. The authors suggest using data mining methods as a component of the development of digital pedagogy for operational monitoring of critical competencies of specialists. This proposed approach is tested on the example of the Russian IT industry, and critical hard and soft competencies are identified. The data source for performing the competence analysis was the Headhunter job aggregator site. To extract the data, the authors used the fields “key_skills”, “description” and “snippet”, which contain basic information about the requirements for competencies in the vacancies. For the technical implementation of the proposed approach, Python is used.