EVOLUTION OF COMPETENCES IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Due to the importance of competences in the European higher education area and the objective to adapt competences to the Bologna Declaration, our department decided two years ago starts a program to test and evaluate the competences of students with the aim of knowing more on competences, present and evolution by the time.

This article reflects the analysis and compare the last study of two years and the evolution of competences in project management using an application called Cycloid. Participant students course different degrees (industrial engineering, industrial design, etc.) and different course levels (first, second, third years of studies) at the Polytechnic School of our University.

The proposed competence evaluation tool is called Cycloid, an ICT (information and communication technology) based application helpful in the process of evaluating thirty concrete competences both personal and social that can be further aggregated into six main groups. This model identifies a generic work role, namely project manager, a person ready to plan, organize, manage, and evaluate complex works or projects that need frequent and solid interaction with other people in order to complete the entire project. Under these circumstances students are adequate to evaluate personal projects.

The objective of such analysis is to improve the quality of education by using knowledge created through the competence self-evaluation. Our aim is to obtain results that show which is the current situation and the evolution of the competences trough time and trough the different courses of the same degree. Also, we introduce changes in these degrees, trying to increase the worst results of the first study of competences.

Students obtain a graduation and achieve a level of knowledge when demonstrating implicit knowledge upon subjects in their studies. Nowadays, students should also demonstrate explicit knowledge in competences. This self-evaluation discovers in which competences students feel strong. This information is useful when designing competence based training and target training methods. It also provides high value information for both teachers and universities in terms of individual and group competences.