UMD Project Management Program Highlighted on ENGINEERING.com

The University of Maryland Project Management Center for Excellence was recently featured on ENGINEERING.com, a website dedicated to bringing the most influential voices in engineering to a worldwide audience.

The article titled, “A Masters in Project Management Keeps the Promotions Coming,” highlighted program offerings and addressed the competitive advantages project management students hold when entering the job market.

Writer Shawn Wasserman interviewed John Cable, Director of the Project Management Center for Excellence, to gain his perspective on why the program has grown so rapidly in just a few years’ time.

“The project management degree has a broad-based focus on project execution,” Cable told Wasserman. “We have a few courses that go beyond the individual project, to the program and to the portfolio. But, our focus is on: if you have a project, how do you define it, how do you execute it, and how do you get it done on time, in budget and with a happy customer?”

As the first U.S. accredited project management program in an engineering school, UMD’s Project Management Center for Excellence is unique, as it is designed by and for engineers and other technical professionals. Boasting a student population from across the nation and around the world, the program thrives on student feedback as, each semester, the center conducts a comprehensive survey and sends the results to instructors, allowing them to build upon their successes with each semester.

Students can also choose between online or on-campus classes, a factor Cable considers a key contributor to the program’s high completion rates.

“We design the online program to equal or exceed the campus program,” Cable told Wasserman. “Everything about the online coursework is the same as the campus work, same syllabus, teacher, and live classes are recorded. The only difference between on-campus and online is the online student has more flexibility.”

“We really try to work on critical thinking skills,” Cable told Wasserman. “The details of how to do something are going to change rapidly. If we teach a methodology two years later the methodology is passé. If you teach a student how to think about the problems and how to solve problems from a critical thinking aspect, then they are equipped to go into the working world. No matter what is presented to them, you’re at a solution! I think that is why these kids tend to be promoted so rapidly.”

Read the full article on ENGINEERING.com.

Published May 28, 2014