The main intent of the research is to learn more about the ways in which PhD doctorants in the Software Engineering field can pre pare themselves for careers in modern exacting and fast changing job market. Results of first diagnostic stage of the study are presented based on materials of a simple quantitative survey of a group of PhD-students, a signifficant part of which is developing in the field of parallel, distributed and cloud computing. This group is currently enrolled in the international program at the Erasmus+ project of eleven universities from five European countries, Russia and Jordan. Processing and statistical analysis results of the survey allowed to fidentify groups of the most signifficant professional skills for future work, to find out the PhD-students level of knowledge and mastering these skills and to evaluate the students intention to obtain them. Conclusions and recommendations presented on the base of comparison the list of skills ranked by PhD students with a list of skills required by employers in the areas close to the Software Engineering.