Overview

Project-based training in university-level education has become a vital factor in preparing students for the demands of the labour market. It is also commonly agreed by personnel managers and recruiting agencies that team-working and problem-solving skills as well as communicative competence vitally contribute to the employability of university graduates. While most educational institutions would subscribe to these tenets, curricula, however, often do not reflect these developments. This is especially evident in the engineering sector. Whereas a sound theoretical basis in the knowledge domain constitutes a sinequanon in the curriculum of technical studies, project-oriented skills have only recently made it to the forefront of attention and are not yet well integrated. Looking at this issue from a transnational angle and adding a virtual dimension, further aggravates the disparity between core technical subjects and soft skills training. Additionally, academic traditions within the European Union have put a widely differing focus on the integration of theory and practice, of applied and work-oriented objectives into their curricula. Individual aspects may well have been given attention but it is their integration and well-defined interrelation that will truly reflect today’s industry practices. This raises relevant questions that need to be addressed if students should be adequately prepared to meet the challenges in their future workplaces, where international collaboration in a distributed setting has become the norm.

The POOL project undertakes to address these questions in a European context and provide a model for integrating distributed project management training into engineering curricula. What aspects need to be considered when preparing students to work in multinational teams? What European consensus can be achieved across national borders with respect to project organisation, documentation and quality control? What areas provide difficulties and why? What industry and real working life demands can be reflected in project training to ideally prepare students for the labour market? What specific aspects have to be taken into account and what pitfalls have to be avoided, if projects are partly carried out online?