The analysis of works on the problems of vocational education pedagogy made it possible to highlight the crisis points in its development, associated, first of all, with the inconsistency of the educational results content with the requirements of employers and the priorities of state policy in the field of digitalization and innovation. The system of forming employees' key competencies has become one of the priority conditions for the creation and effective functioning of the Russian state innovative economy. The active and widespread introduction of modern science-intensive technologies leads to an increase in the requirements of the state and society for the qualifications of university graduates, the level of their intercultural competence, and readiness to master new approaches to professional activity. These factors explain the close attention of scientists and specialists from different branches of knowledge and areas of pedagogy, psychology, public administration, sociology, informatics, etc., to the problems of intercultural training of future specialists in the context of globalization. The article proposes the periodization of the development of the problem of forming digital intercultural competence, the identification of characteristic trends at the second stage of the problem development, the identification of socio-cultural, historical, scientific and theoretical prerequisites for its formation and development. At the same time, the etymological complexity and diversity of the research problem led to the identification of historical trends in several directions: emergence of information society; formation of the competence nature of the higher education system; development of the problem of forming intercultural competence.