Managing the Project: The Essential Need for Project Management Training and Education in Graduate Schools

Abstract

To deal with today's complex work environment, more generic skills are being introduced into the university course curriculum to train students for the future. One key skill that is in high demand in the industry today is of Project Management for fresh graduates of all disciplines. However, most project management training and learning has been long confined to only management and business schools and only recently it's importance as a general training skill has been realized. In this paper, we present our experiences of training and educating Project Management skills at graduate school in a trans-graduate school system (Nitobe School). We present the methods and importance of training project management at an early stage to graduate students and key dimensions of student learning experiences. From our study, we found that training PM at an early stage not only brings out significant improvement in student's ability to handle problem-based tasks and projects in their respective graduate schools but also provide preparation training for their future employment aspirations.