EDUCATION IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT: TRAINING AND EVALUATION OF MANAGERIAL SKILLS

The aim of this paper is to present the results and experiences in training and evaluating the development of managerial skills that are the main goal in the MSc in Project Management of the University of Valladolid. The students are postgraduate that combine professional activities with the educational programme. They must allocate 1.200 hours in a year to succeed, which is not an easy task.
Once the master finishes, the students can voluntarily apply to get a professional accreditation from one of the largest international professional associations: the Project Management Institute (www.pmi.com) and the International Project Management Association (www.ipma.ch). The evaluation is totally independent from the staff and teachers that participate in the master. The 100% of the graduated students in the Master (the 20% of the total students that have participated in this programme) that applied for one of those professional certificates, have succeed in their independent evaluations, what represents a great success. In particular, the IPMA-AEIPRO evaluation underlined the high level that our students have got in behavioral skills.
We will focus in the paper in explaining the activities that our students have to manage during the course, and the evaluation methods. Our experience from the academic year 2005-06 (we are closing the fourth edition) is that the graduated students show a high level of satisfaction with the experiences they live and the contents of the programme, and that they get the expected skills in a natural way. Our success in the achievement of the managerial skills of project managers have been confirmed by one of the main professional associations: IPMA, which have registered our educational program, the MSc in Project Management of the University of Valladolid, as the REP-09-002.