The problems of supporting competitiveness of organizations determine its comparative competitive advantages with respect to the rivals in the market of educational services. This approach is an essential condition of functioning of the system of additional professional education (hereinafter - APE) from the perspective of innovative support.

The weak position of the previous APE system was the absence of a structure responsible for profit gain. At that, the organizational connections that existed independently were weak, which resulted in diminishing the opportunities of innovative transformation in the APE system.

According to the authors, the main condition of stable operation of the APE system is the improvement of competitiveness of this education segment, which requires:

- applying scientific approach to innovative, strategic management;

- developing a mechanism of flexible pricing depending on the education process market state;

- implementing an innovative strategy and ensuring the unity of development of information technology and management with accurate detailing by stages of competitive advantages (CA);

- unifying the quality and the aggregate costs for all stages of the lifecycle of entities;

- applying modern methods of research and development (functional cost analysis, simulation, forecasting, optimization, economic substantiation of each decision, program-based planning, strategic innovative projects, etc.);

- maintaining the interconnection between the functions of managing any process at any stage of the lifecycle of entities;

- forming a system of measures related to managing competitiveness of APE entities with various extent of adaptation to market environment.

The system of innovative support of the APE entities and the system of competitiveness support (hereinafter - SCS) are a set of interconnected measures, which enable an entity in certain modes of operation to achieve predictable results.

For improvement of competitiveness of the APE entities, it is necessary to select the most important indexes and factors of the macroenvironment, the infrastructure of the region, and the microenvironment, record and analyze these readings regularly. The main task of the analysis is to determine the state balance of the elements of the external environment of the studied entity's SCS, develop and implement measures on improvement of the elements' quality and ensuring of their balance. It is reasonable to study the elements of the educational innovative system from the perspective of competitiveness in the following order:

The SCS efficiency is to be determined by the quality of scientific support of management of the APE competitiveness.

We find the structure of the subsystem of SCS scientific support to be as follows:

1. study of the problems of competition and competitiveness as the motion force in education;

2. economic laws of market relations mechanisms;

3. laws of organization under static and dynamic conditions;

4. scientific approach to management of competitiveness of the APE entities;

5. the principles of entities' management;

6. the system of project management;

7. the main methods of management;

8. study of the competitive advantages of various entities;

9. the methodological principles of evaluation of APE competitiveness.

SCS functioning is possible based on the analysis of entities, economic feasibility, rationalization of structures and processes, and management of the education quality.

Generally, the work on evaluation of competitiveness of the services of an APE entity includes stating the task, analyzing and forecasting the demand, prices, costs, and requirements of the consumer market, selecting technical and economic indexes for evaluation of the competitiveness of the entity, selecting the database (of analogs) for comparing with the real entity, evaluating the competitiveness of the APE entity by information and economic readings, providing integral assessment of the competitiveness of the APE entity, and developing recommendations.