Project Management Education: opportunities and challenges.

2007

With the increasing complexity of constructing and maintaining infrastructure facilities, there has been a growing need for civil and environmental engineers to supplement their technical and managerial skills through advanced degrees in engineering and management. ASCE has clearly supported this idea by adopting the master's degree (or its equivalent) as the first professional degree. The means to acquire additional technical expertise has been addressed quite adequately by a variety of master's degree programs at many universities throughout the country, but the challenge to impart the requisite managerial skills has not been satisfied very effectively. The latter is based on the premise that an MBA education is not ideal for managing large public and private projects which require managers with considerable technical expertise, as well as managerial skills. The Master of Project Management (MPM) program at Northwestern University has been established in response to this specific need in the construction industry.

The paper has two clear aims, the first being to establish the added value of the role provided by a construction Project Manager to the client. Having established a valid rationale for engaging in the 'Project Management Role', a link to educational processes is explained. Thus, the second aim of the paper is to provide an appropriate methodology for including Project Management into the curriculum of both undergraduate and postgraduate provisions. The theme taken is that of adopting a 'learning outcomes' approach. Therefore the concentration of the paper is not to re-explore the topic of Project Management but to validate the learning outcomes approach. In order to achieve the noted validation, an explanation of learning outcomes linked to assessment criteria will be undertaken. The ultimate objective therefore is the production of a suitable framework for incorporating learning outcomes into undergraduate and postgraduate courses. The developed framework can then be adopted or adapted by other higher educational establishments.

European Journal of Social Sciences Education and Research

The object of this paper is to explore the actual practice in project management education in the Netherlands and compare it to reference institutions and recent literature. A little over 40% of the Higher Education institutions in the Netherlands mentions PM education in programs and/or courses. A total of 264 courses, minors and programs in the Netherlands found. In reference institutions 33 courses and programs are found and 36 publications deal with actual teaching of project management in Higher Education. Comparing these sources finds traditional methods of teaching and testing, a roughly comparable focus on subjects and an unsupported high claim of learning level, while the number of credits assigned to project management is relatively small. There is a strong focus on planning without execution, which is critiqued as is the promoted Project Based Learning.

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International Journal of Project Management, 2008

This paper is intended to provide an insight into the importance of human skills in project management success and the apparent lack of emphasis placed on this within the context of university education. The discussion will call upon the viewpoints of many notable authors in respect to the human or 'soft' skills that are necessary in the management of projects. Against this background a review will be conducted into how well project management literature and university education equips potential project managers in the area of human skills. As the PMBOK Ò Guide is one of the major recommended texts in Australian universities offering project management education, the paper will identify that it predominantly emphasises the required 'hard (technical) skills' at the expense of the 'soft (human) skills'. Subsequent discussion will highlight the need for a balance between hard and soft skills within project management education in universities. It will conclude that educators within this discipline should recognise the importance of incorporating greater human skills aspects into their educational programs.

Projects play an important role in modern enterprises, not only as arenas for corporate renewal and capability integration, but also for the development of leadership capacity. As a consequence, the area of project management is becoming increasingly important for universities and management educators. Previous research and reports, however, have given severe critique to much of the project management education for its lack of relevance and rigor – but offered surprisingly little guidance as to what to do to deal with the problems. In this paper, our aim is to contribute to the current debate about project management education for practicing managers. We draw on more than ten years of experience from two senior-level education programs to show how educational practices can be developed to stimulate knowledge co-production between practitioners and academia. We suggest a model based on a ‘‘social twist” of experiential learning theory and discuss six learning modes of how to rejuvenate, stretch and improve project management education.

Proceedings of the ICE - Management, Procurement and Law, Volume 166, Issue 2, Pp. 68 –76, 2012

This research builds on previous work conducted within the area of professional civil engineering education that explores pedagogical implications of teaching project management within the civil engineering discipline. The focus is to explore how pedagogical considerations impact on the experience of civil engineering students studying project management. This exploration utilises data gathered from a survey of 410 management and civil engineering students studying project management across four UK universities. Data analysis was conducted using a combination of exploratory data analysis, three-way multidimensional scaling and property fitting. Although differences in salience were found, the existence of common dimensions of project management pedagogy suggests two important implications: first that project management is independent of specific discipline peculiarities (and by implication, interdisciplinary), and second that the approach to teaching should take into account the con...

JES. Journal of Engineering Sciences

Teaching project management to Architecture design students is quite challenging. Project management education on university level has to equip students with core competencies, the socalled 21 st century ones, which should enable them to cope with market needs. In addition, it has to make full use of the architecture students existing skills. Thus, this paper aims at evaluating the role played by project management education towards the enhancement of the competencies of Architecture students. To achieve the aim of this paper, a survey questionnaire was applied on senior students who have been taught the PM course for 8 successive years at Ain Shams University. Students who attended the course since 2010-2017 participated in the survey, where they had to assess the course after 6 to 1 year(s) of graduation. The number of respondents was almost 300. All participants reported mostly positive impact about the teaching methods in the PM courses. Among the core skills that have been realized through teaching the course were critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity.