Traceability of Intra- and Interpersonal Skills: From Education to Labor Market

Abstract

Both educators and employers agree there is a growing gap between competences that labor market expects from its new employees and skills they own. Literature review holds that a set of nontechnical, professional abilities and intra-and interpersonal attitudes are required to close this gap and indicates that more training of soft skills is needed to access employment and success in work life. Although these skills are theoretically included in educational stages, project management approach can be incorporated to improve students and new employees' practical curricula. The methodology consists of the critical review of the competency frameworks established by the DeSeCo and Tuning projects, confronting them against the requirements currently demanded by labor market, based on the reports of Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG, to detect inconsistencies between educational and professional stages and check if project management standards, by PMI and IPMA, cover them. Compiling these weaknesses, actions can be established aimed at solving them, based on project management proposals. The incorporation of project management concepts into educational stages, especially the vision by competences, contributes to improve the employability by highlighting those transverse but essential skills that lead to versatile and successful professionals. To achieve this, it is necessary to care for human competences.

Project Management Competences by Teaching and Research Staff for the Sustained Success of Engineering Education

“…EU and ISO organizations and IPMA and PMI associations also group individual competences into three blocks: In summary, PM by competences, thanks to its intrinsic transverse and humanistic condition, covers management requirements in any sector [52], including research and education, which is considered as a professional sector as any other in this research. Within this framework, development of competences by the TRS allows achieving better project performance, thanks to growing motivation, better self-organization and reduced need for centralized control [53].…”

“…In education, cooperative project-based learning proposals and coworking competence-based training initiatives can introduce professional PM competences into theoretical educational frameworks [67,68]. In the case of the EU and Latin America, these approaches are broadly covered by [52]: First, the DeSeCo project helps young people develop as individuals and professionals in training projects that will last a lifetime, addressing complex demands by putting into action, in specific situations, psychological resources, skills and attitudes. After that, the Tuning projects seek to enable university students to prepare and carry out sufficiently and responsibly the tasks entrusted to them, as future professionals.…”

Trabajando en Proyectos con Lego Serious Play ®

“…Las competencias en dirección de proyectos resultan esenciales en el mundo laboral del siglo XXI (Cerezo-Narváez et al, 2018), si bien pueden ser entrenadas mediante técnicas de gamificación (IPMA, 2015). En este contexto, LSP conecta la metodología Design Thinking con la dirección de proyectos, trabajando las competencias de las personas.…”

Conceptual Framework of a Simulation-Based Manpower Planning Method for Construction Enterprises

“…People are not literally a resource, but they are disposed of resources of potential use for the enterprise: they possess qualities that enable them to perform useful roles in organizations. The components of human resources understood this way include knowledge, abilities, skills, attitude, values, and motivation [5,6].…”