Back to school

Is there merit in obtaining a university qualification in project management? Jo Russell investigates.

A university qualification in project management is not something to be undertaken lightly. There is a significant cost involved – fees for a one-year MSc are in the region of £12,000 – and then there is the time commitment, whether you take a career break to study, or study part time while juggling a full-time work role. 

Despite these considerations, project management university courses are gaining in popularity. At Southampton Solent University, the MSc programme started two years ago in response to demand. Without having to embark on a marketing exercise to promote the course, it has proved to be one of the most popular masters in the business school from the outset. 

Senior lecturer Serkan Ceylan says that the course attracts a range of people: “I have students who have been doing project management for the past 30 years, but who find that people are now asking for qualifications. And I have students who have come from a bachelor’s degree through which they were unable to find work, and who have now secured project management roles.” 

A lot of the interest is from small- to mid-sized companies that are waking up to the role of project management, but have no in-house expertise. 

“People are moving away from the times when you found someone who was good at their normal job and then said, ‘Can you take on this project now?’” continues Ceylan. “They are seeing that, where that has happened in the past, their success rate has not been great. They now see it is important to have skilled people who have done some form of project management course.”

Part of the popularity may be down to course content. Ceylan explains: “Southampton Solent is the only university in the UK that delivers PRINCE2® and agile project management foundation and practitioner accreditation as part of the course, plus the course is aligned to the APM Body of Knowledge.” 

Practical application

The course is taught by ex-industry people rather than academics, he continues, meaning that the emphasis is on practical application rather than theory and blue-sky research. 

A similarly practical approach is adopted at Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), part of the University of Warwick, where short courses and full- or part-time MSc qualifications in programme and project management are available.

“After each module, we have post-module assignments in which the learning is applied against a work-based project, so you take the learning back to the project,” says Julian Amey, principal fellow and acting director for professional and executive education at WMG. 

“Students doing a full master’s do a dissertation that is typically a work-based project. The ethos here is not theoretical academia, but applying the learning in a practical way,” he explains.

Amey sees that a key advantage of a university education over in-house training or learning on the job is a university’s ability to draw from numerous sources in order to teach best practice, and ensure the content is relevant and innovative by continually refreshing or renewing it. WMG, for example, has created a new module on collaborative leadership. 

“Collaborative working is becoming a key theme for a number of organisations. On many projects you effectively have a value chain of companies needing to work together. Organisations like Network Rail are insisting that supply-chain partners are certified to the standard on collaborative working. We are trying to teach managers to operate and lead in that new kind of environment, rather than adopting the traditional command-and-control approach,” says Amey.

Course leaders remain on the lookout for new and best-practice examples, and are able to call in external experts or practitioners from other companies who can give real-life case studies that a standard training provider would not be able to.

Real-life relevance

The vast majority of students at WMG have been sponsored by their companies, several of which have longstanding relationships with the university. WMG is able to tailor the short courses to suit their needs and make them as relevant as possible.

The short course was the route initially taken by Pretee Patel, commercial manager at UTC Aerospace Systems. 

In 2012, Patel undertook a company-specific postgraduate programme, which incorporated three modules that were effectively MSc modules. At the end of the course, she put the three modules towards an MSc, believing that it would not only be interesting, but would further her career prospects. The fact that it was part time (over two years) meant that it fitted around family and work commitments.

Patel says that the MSc has given her skills that she has been able to take back to the workplace. 

“I feel that I am more resilient and can look at things more objectively. I can look for solutions more instinctively, and am more proactive in trying to sort things out and look for the lessons that can be learnt,” she says. She does not believe that the MSc could be substituted for in-house training. 

“The two are quite different. The MSc talks about change management and leadership. It references articles and different businesses’ experience. You couldn’t learn those things in house. Also, with an MSc, you are constantly looking at the arguments as to why things are done and developed, and considering the pros and cons. In house, you are learning something that has already been predefined,” she says.

The frustration since graduating is that, despite the company being fully supportive of and financing the course, there has been little attempt to maximise that investment.

“From a business point of view, the MSc probably hasn’t been recognised as much as I would like. My role hasn’t changed, which is a frustration,” states Patel. “The company has a view on how personal development impacts positively on employees, but there is a disjoint between that view and then delivering the benefit back into the company.”

There are mutual benefits to completion of a university course, including greater skill attainment for both employee and employer. The trick lies in the subsequent use of those skills to best effect.

Jo Russell is a business writer and editor.