The monitoring of educational quality as a pillar for good Project Management in future engineering professionals

Abstract

Quality should always be present in the management of engineering projects, but for future professionals to be able to internalize the concept of quality in everything they do, the subject must have been a transversal axis in their learning process since their training. The self-assessment and accreditation processes of the careers seek to ensure a minimum quality in the professional education of future graduates, and with this influence the professional skills they can develop. In recent decades, the accrediting agencies of engineering careers worldwide have promoted the need to evaluate the graduation attributes in people who graduate from engineering careers as a previous step to guarantee the desired competencies in the professional person, which it is also directly related to quality assurance of higher education in these disciplines. Linking the findings of these evaluation processes with curricular reforms is a key input to improve the development of careers and teaching-learning processes with students, especially in some key attributes for good project management such as: oral and written communication, teamwork, problem solving, among others. The present work exposes the success case of the Civil Engineering Degree of the University of Costa Rica, where the integral methodology that was applied to carry out a curricular reform that contemplates the need to demonstrate the graduation attributes and the challenges is addressed. of accreditation with a view to improving the program, linked to how this is expected to contribute to the skills of future engineers in the execution of engineering projects.