Developing Competences in Building Engineering through the use of Qualitative Research Methods: the Case of a Final Project Workshop

Abstract

That current labour markets increasingly rely on higher skill levels and transversal competences is well known. In fact, in order to confront this fact, the European Ministers responsible for Higher Education have agreed that "higher education should equip students with the advanced knowledge, skills and competences they will need throughout their professional lives". In the case of Spanish Building Engineers, their most characteristic professional profiles are: 1. Technical project management, 2. Production project management, 3. Prevention, health and safety, 4. Building exploitation, 5. Consulting, counselling and technical auditing, and 6. Technical project drafting and development. In order to attain these, the study program for Building Engineering takes into account the acquisition of both generic and specific competencies. Among the first group the following could be highlighted: ability for communicating oral and written information; ethic behavior in engineering, critical and self-criticism awareness; ability to gather and interpret relevant data in order to give opinions including observations regarding important social, scientific or ethical issues. The School of Building Engineering, in the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, has developed a new process for the Final Project which started in the year 2010-2011. It is organized in 24 workshops of different contents composed of 15 to 18 students. This paper focuses on one of these workshops: "Human Resource Management in Construction", which has allowed us to experiment with qualitative research methods as a way of attaining the above mentioned competences. Qualitative research can be construed as a research strategy that usually emphasizes words rather than quantification in the collection and analysis of data. It predominantly highlights an inductive approach to the relationship between theory and research, rejecting the practices and the norms of the natural scientific model and of positivism, in preference for an emphasis on the ways in which individuals interpret their social world. This perspective has the potential to provide complementary insights, enriching understanding of the perspective of those working in the construction sector. As the students carried out their final project research according to qualitative methods, they had to overcome associated challenges and complexities that we meet in everyday life, such as being able to organize a meeting between four or five busy people, organizing a place for a meeting, dealing with people they had never met before, and solving problems such as equipment failure and noncooperation. This paper reports different themes and advantages that emerged from the final project workshop experience, and shows how the students enhanced some of the generic competencies. Keywords