Educating Geotechnical Risk Management

Education is of paramount importance. It allows the next generation of geotechnical professionals to answer the increasing demands of construction projects. These are caused by growing pressures on costs and time, and easily affect safety and quality. One of the answers to these challenges is the well-structured application of geotechnical risk management in all phases of construction projects. For this reason, the Civil Engineering and Applied Earth Sciences Faculty of the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, decided to develop the MSc course Geo Risk Management. This course is part of the core curriculum and any student doing a MSc in Geotechnical Engineering has to take it. In total, the course contains 12 blocks of lectures, with each block including two hours. Geo Risk Management aims to teach the student how to apply structured management of ground- related risk during the entire process of any construction project. The tried and tested GeoQ approach for ground-related risk management serves as a framework for the course. This paper's authors jointly developed the course, based on their extensive professional practices in The Netherlands and abroad. They lecture the course as well, for the first time in February and March of 2007. The main objective of this paper is to inspire professionals in academia and the industry to develop and attend similar courses elsewhere. These may be undergraduate MSc courses, postgraduate courses or summer courses. The latter two types may become particularly useful to geotechnical practitioners. The Geo Risk Management course is subdivided in two main parts. Part one concerns the theoretical part of geotechnical risk management. It explains the concepts of uncertainty, risk and risk management. Due attention is given to the often under-estimated human factor in geotechnical risk management. The key-roles of individual professionals and their teams, within the entire risk management process of construction projects, are highlighted. Six generic project phases and six generic risk management steps are presented. Also, an abundant number of existing tools that facilitate the risk management process are introduced. Part two covers a number of specific topics, merely based on certain types of geotechnical constructions. Examples are underground constructions, such as tunnels, water retaining structures, and infrastructure such as roads and railroads. The focus of part two is on how to apply geotechnical risk management in our day-to-day practices. Cases demonstrate the pitfalls and the opportunities of ground-related risk management. In summary, this paper presents the main structure and content of the new Geo Risk Management lectures of the Delft University of Technology. Also feedback of the students, as gained during running the course for the first time, will be shared with the readers. Such feedback may help us during the further development of geotechnical risk management in general and its education in particular. The paper ends with a number of conclusions about this rather yet unexplored adventure of teaching risk management, rather than the more conventional risk analysis, to MSc students in Geotechnical Engineering.