Promoting professional project management skills in engineering higher education: project-based learning(pbl) strategy

The objective of this paper is to address the methodologicalprocess of promoting professional project management skills inEngineering Higher Education, evolving from Graduate to Postgraduate Programs. The strategy was born from acooperative model of Project Based Learning (PBL) created with the experience of the GIE-Project, EducationalInnovation Group (EIG) of the Technical University of Madrid (UPM), in collaboration with other EIG and industrystakeholders external to the university. The model has evolved and undergone various phases until being inserted in theEuropean Space of Higher Education with the International Project Management Association (IPMA) competences. Overtime GIE-Project strategy has developed into a process, an approach to designing, developing, implementing, evaluatingand promoting professional Project Management skills in first (Graduate), second (Postgraduate) and third (PhD) cycledegree programmes. The results show how phasing in teaching aimed across different educational levels facilitates agradual training in the 46 elements of professional competences required to obtain the IPMA’s certification on ProjectManagement. The educational strategy is conceived as a new teaching dimension within the framework of the EHEA,taking the course projects—Preliminary course, Final Degree Course Project and Final Master’s Course Project—as aneducational component suited for generating a ‘‘pre-work experience’’ to link teaching activity to the business andindustrial environment. This paper shows the main success factors in the process that was carried out: the links betweenteaching-professional certification, the evaluation of professional competences, Project Based Learning, teaching subjectsin connection with real-world problems, cooperative learning, mobility activities and integration and applied teaching-research.