The article defines the initial level of swimming readiness and assessment of students' knowledge about the basics of applied swimming. There was developed a questionnaire and a survey (questioning) of students was conducted within the framework of the "Swimming" discipline. The results of the questioning made it possible to identify the main issues of building the educational process of teaching students to sports and applied swimming in order to form professional competencies, and also confirmed the need to develop a model of swimming curriculum with an applied focus to expand the possibility of using swimming skills by future specialists in the field of protection, safety and security in their professional activity.