New Concept for Integrating Engineering Internships Into Project Management Training

Project management (PM) skills are increasingly named among the key skill for future engineers [1]. Offering great (perhaps even world-class) PM training for engineering students is no easy feat. Building a bridge, developing an app, and increasing power plant utilization differs not just in the mere physics and degree of outdoorsiness, but also in activity sequence, people involvement, and organizational complexity.

Universities provide different solutions for PM training. While some universities offer one PM course with dedicated PM experts for all engineering disciplines, others integrate PM training directly into an engineering discipline’s core courses with supervisors, who are experts in the engineering discipline rather than PM.

This paper presents a 10-credit two-course project management series developed at the center for bachelor of engineering education at the Technical University of Denmark. The two courses are labelled “Project management – tools and methods” and “Project management – leadership, flow and effect”. Between the two courses, students apply the tools form the first course in their 20-week engineering internship.

The two-course series bridges the divide between PM expertise and subject matter expertise. Directors of individual education programs decide whether to adopt one or both courses in their program. If they do, they co-author a subject matter case with a PM expert designed specifically for their students.

The paper describes (a) the content of the two-course series, (b) cooperation between PM and subject matter experts, and (c) how progression is ensured among others by placing the two courses on either side of students’ engineering internships.