This is the transcript for the video Bachelor of Construction Project Management
Peter Smith:
Okay. Good morning, everyone. My name’s Peter Smith and I’m the program director for the Bachelor of Construction Project Management course. And we’re going to give you a quick presentation, quick overview of our course. I’ve got two colleagues with me that are going to assist with the presentation, Alireza Fard Fini and he’s the acting program director for our course this semester. And we’ve got one of our star students Nick Tsai, who, at the end of my presentation, will give you some insights in what it’s like to be a Bachelor of Construction Project Management student. Before we get going, just like to provide the acknowledgement of country. So I’d like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation upon whose ancestral lands our city campus now stands. I’d also like to pay respect to the elders both past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for this land.
And it’s also important to let you know that we are recording this session, but what we’re only recording is the audio and screen share. So unless you put your video on, we won’t be capturing any images of you or anything like that. There will be a question and answer session at the end where they will be recorded, any questions that are put up and so on, but I won’t read through all of this, while I’m talking, if you could just quickly skim or read through the detail here. If you don’t wish to be involved or be recorded, at the end there, it says if you could just email UTS that email marketingprivacy@uts.edu.au. But through this presentation, I’m just going to be sharing my screen. And then at the end, as I said, we’re going to be talking with Nick about his experiences in our course so far, and then we’ll finish off with questions and answers. And also there’s a live chat that’s going on all day that you can also contribute, or you can also access at the end of this session.
All right. So this is how to ask questions. And so there should be a Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. So as I’m talking, you can type in questions. I probably won’t be able to address them immediately, but we’ll look at those at the end of my presentation because I want to make sure I get through all of the key things that I’d like to let you know about. Okay, so our Bachelor of Construction Project Management course, as mentioned, I’m the program director for our course, and you can see there my profile. You can go to that link on the UTS website to get further details about myself. And as mentioned, we’ve got Alireza Fard Fini, who’s the acting program director for this spring semester. Our semesters we call, autumn is the first semester, spring is the second semester. I’m actually on research leave this semester. And so Ali’s taking over the reigns and doing a great job. So any further questions that you have during this in coming days, you can contact me, but you can also contact Alireza.
Okay, so now our course is nested in our Design, Architecture and Building Faculty. In our faculty we’ve got three schools. You can see the Architecture and Design and the Built Environment. So our course is within the School of the Built Environment, but we’re all under that banner of our Design, Architecture and Building Faculty. In our school, we’ve got two undergrad courses, one is Construction Project Management, the other is Property Economics, and then we’ve got a suite of post-graduate courses in the school as well. Okay, I always like to emphasize this right at the outset, because it is very important. If you really want to do this course, it’s really important that you put UTS Bachelor of Construction Project Management as your number one preference.
Now, I’d like to follow up this, because over the years quite a few students have been caught out by this. And for example, you may think you’re not going to get the ATAR necessary to get into our course so you put UTS in second or third choice, whatever. But what happens is, if you actually do end up with the ATAR, you are able to get into the course. Because you haven’t put UTS as your number one preference, there’s every chance you want to get into the course, because we usually only have one round of offers and that’s it. All right? So even if you don’t think you’ll get the ATAR and you really want to do the course here at UTS, please make sure you put UTS as your number one. I can’t emphasize that more strongly. When we look at other courses in our area, the main courses are at Western Sydney University and UNSW. And so, as mentioned, we’ve got students who put those courses as their number one preference thinking they won’t get into our course, then getting the ATAR and realizing they can’t get in.
Okay. The demand for our course is very strong. You can see there the trends of ATAR scores over the years. You can see there in 2017 in particular, the ATAR was very high. You’ll see a drop from there, but for you I would imagine you’re looking at that and say, “Well, that’s good.” There’s a reason for a dropping, two things. There’s been an adjustment in terms of how ATAR scores are published throughout Australian universities, but also in the last couple of years, we’ve had quite a large increase in students and that’s led to an adjustment of the ATAR. But irrespective, our ATAR entry scores is the highest of any comparable course in Australia and I think that reflects this very strong demand for our course. And we also have a cap on numbers so we don’t have too many students in our course. I’ll mention we did have an increase in numbers in the last couple of years, but we’ve kept that at a manageable level.
In terms of what’s going to happen in 2022. We’re in crazy times, it’s very, very hard to predict what the ATAR might be, but I’d imagine it’s not going to change dramatically. Now, in terms of our course, I’m not here to kind of beat my chest and say, “UTS’s Construction Project Management course is the best of the world,” more of that kind of thing. But the thing is we’ve got a very, very strong course and it performs very, very well. The university does a review of all courses and subjects throughout the university every year and they come up with a report. And with these reports, our course is rated in the top 20 of all the best performing courses in the whole university for each of those years you can see there, so 2012, 14, 16, 18 and most recently 20. So this is the front cover of the 2020 report. It’s stated 2021, but it’s based on the 2020 academic year. So we’ve got a very high performing course.
Now, our course focuses on the professional management of construction projects. The main disciplines that are covered, are project management, construction management, and what we call quantities surveying and cost management. There’s a very, very strong project management thing throughout the whole course and I’ll talk about that shortly. There’s a very high level use of digital technologies, which is really important for our industry and it puts our graduates a step ahead of others. I think graduating from our course with some very detailed knowledge about leading edge technologies that our companies in our industry are moving towards using, and are really relying on our graduates to assist them with that.
We have a whole range of different innovative teaching approaches. We have industry experience requirements, you need to get a certain amount of industry experience before you graduate from the course. We’ve always had a strong emphasis on a collaborative education process, combining real world industry experience, as well as your academic studies. We see so much benefit in students combining both. There’s also a huge amount of employment opportunities with our course and I’ll talk about that shortly as well. Under the banner of project management, there’s so many different subsets that you can work in. And as a result, we’ve got one of the highest graduate employment rates in the whole university, and also one of the highest graduating salaries. Now, life’s not all about money, far from it, but when you do a university course, I think it’s really, really important that you do a course where there’s very, very good employment prospects and the salary prospects are also good. And we certainly tick the box there.
Construction has traditionally been a male oriented industry, but that’s changing significantly now. And in our course, we have a very large number of female students now, approximately 25%. I think it’s even higher than that, 26, 27%, which is fantastic and really, really important for our industry. Now, the course is also internationally recognized as Project Management degree on a time. Obviously we have a construction focus, but it’s also, because we’ve got a very strong project management team, it’s also recognized globally by the Project Management Institute. That’s the preeminent global project management organization across the world. And they’ve got very, very high standards for accreditation and they don’t accredit many undergraduate courses around the world, mostly postgraduate master’s courses and so on.
But ours is accredited and has been so for about five or six years. It’s only one of a very small number undergraduate courses accredited globally. And it’s the only one of its type accredited here in Australia, specifically in the construction project management area. We’re also accredited by the Australian Institute of Project Management. Now you might think, “Well, so what.” It actually is very important because what you’ll realize with our course is that you’ll learn about construction project management, but when you finish our course and you gain experience in construction project management and all its subsets, what you’ll find is there’s going to be a lot of other potential opportunities in other industries and other sectors because project management applies to all industry sectors.
And so we’ve got graduates now that have branched out into so many other different areas, infrastructure, petrochemical, oil and gas, but also other completely different sectors like education, in other areas like the humanitarian sector, we’ve got some graduates that have worked for organizations like the World Bank and all that kind of thing, and working in many, many other industries. And so that even adds further to your employment prospects and also giving you options as you progress through your lives in terms of different career directions and so on. So that’s a real plus for our course. Now, in our course, our graduates, they mainly when they finish our course, they mainly work, not in all cases, but the majority of our students tend to work for the larger contractors in the larger consultancy practices. But having said that we’ve still got a lot of graduates who work for the smaller organizations, and there’s a lot of pros and cons both ways.
But also the students in our course, students need to get industry experience while we’re doing our course. And those that are doing our course tend to work for the similar kinds of organizations. So our course is definitely targeted at the higher end of the market, the professional management of projects, we have very good technical content, which is really, really important to underpin your careers about how to construct things, et cetera, but we’re not about how to hammer a nail and build with your hands or anything like that. While we have strong technical component, our course is targeted to the management side of things. Now we’ve got very strong links with industry, industry employers. We’ve got a very good reputation. You can see some of the employers of our students up there on the screen, very, very strong relationship with industry employers. We also have a lot of people from industry that come in and give guest lectures and part-time lecturers in our course and so on, which is a real strength.
In terms of the course structure, our course is four years. Now, I know many university courses are three years, but it’s quite common for courses of our type be four years long. Now, one of the key reasons, for example, here in New South Wales, to be able to get your builders license, your degree needs to be four years long. And so if it’s not, you need to do further study. But ours is a four years full-time course, and that enables us to cover a lot more content. And that means that when you graduate, you got more knowledge moving forward. But also you’ve got part-time options. We’ve got two main semesters, autumn and spring, first semester, second semester. And in summer we do run some subjects so you can accelerate or streamline your study pattern.
In the course, we’ve got 28 core subjects and four elected subjects. A full-time load is normally four subjects per semester, eight subjects will be normal academic year. Part-time can be three subjects per semester, or it could be one subject per semester. You’ve got a lot of flexibility to adapt your study. You can do one subject, you can do four subjects. And that flexibility is very beneficial for students, particularly when they start working in industry and so on. We also have a global exchange program at UTS. And I love traveling and hopefully in time, hopefully next year sometime we’ll all be able to travel overseas again. And as part of the course, you can also study part of that overseas. It could be one semester, in certain circumstances, you can study one whole year overseas, and that’s really, really exciting. And many of our students take up that opportunity.
I’ve spoken many times already about industry experience, what you need to do in our courses to gain 200 days industry experience before graduation. What our students, when they see that, initially they think, “Oh gosh, I just want to do my degree and I don’t want to think about working till I finish undergrad. I just want to party and have fun and enjoy university life and all of that kind of thing.” That’s what you should do, I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that, you should enjoy university experience. But over the four years, what students realize is that “Okay, if I can get some industry experience before I graduate, that’s going to really set me up very, very nicely and by the time I’ve graduated, I’ve got 200 days experience under my belt,” which is equivalent to close to about a calendar years worth of work. And so what we find is a lot of students in first year are thinking, “No, I don’t really… Not really keen on that.”
By the time they get to second or third year, they start to see the value. They start to see their student colleagues getting jobs. And then they think, “Okay, this is pretty exciting,” and then opportunities come up. Now you need to organize that yourself, because part of the learning process is applying for jobs and all of that kind of thing. But because we’ve got so many industry contracts and we’ve got some close relationships with industry employers and so on, very few students have any difficulty in meetings these requirements, very, very few. And even if they hadn’t met that requirement, by the end of their degree, it doesn’t take them long to get that. All right. So it really helps with your employment prospects and combining the academic studies with real-world experience, it really does make a difference. And so when you’re in your third or fourth year, because so many of the students, and probably yourself will be working in industry, it really makes the class so much more dynamic because you’re bringing a lot of knowledge into the classroom. You can relate what you’re learning to what you’re doing in industry.
So, as I’ve mentioned, very good employment prospects, one of the highest graduate employability rates in the industry, one of the highest graduating salaries. So the opportunity is not just here in Australia, but also around the world, so many opportunities. And as part of that, I’ve mentioned that as a project manager degree, you can branch out into other fields. But under the banner of project management, there’s so many areas that you could work in and you usually will start in one of the subsets that you can see on the screen here. I’m not aware of anyone in construction who immediately becomes a project manager. You’ve got to work your way through that to get to that level. We had quite a few of our students who never actually aspire to be the project manager, they prefer to work in subset fields and stay there, like construction management, cost management, estimating, planning, or whatever. But I’ve listed there, and that list isn’t exhaustive, but a whole range of subset areas under the project management banner, where you can work in and build up your knowledge.
And what you’ll find is many of our students graduates move across many of these different areas. Many of our employees have good cadet graduate training programs and so on where you’re getting experience across many, many different fields. And so when you combine all of that, it’s really the reason why there’s so many great employment opportunities out there. Now, obviously I can’t guarantee you’re going to get a job. I don’t have that crystal ball, things can happen economically around the world and whatever. But if I look back over the history of this course, this course by the way has been going for well over 40 years, the employment prospects, even when the industry or the economy is down, the employment opportunities are typically still very, very strong.
Okay. Our course is accredited by all of the major accrediting bodies that accredit these kinds of courses. I’ve mentioned the PMI, the Australian Project Management, also the Australian Institute of Building, Quality Surveyors, RICS, Builders Licensing and the Chartered Institute of Building. Now, because it’s a four year course, we don’t have a separate honors year, and so your honors are based on your average marks through the whole course. And you can see the different levels here, so you can get first class, second class honors or normal degree.
Now there’s a special admission scheme and adjustment points and this is really worth taking note of. There are many, many things schemes to get into our course, particularly where you may not have necessary ATAR. So we have bonus points for year 12, certain subjects. We have bonus points for females, to encourage more females to come into our industry, it has educational access and it’s schemed. But that link there is really important to go through, to see what you might be eligible for. So you probably don’t have time to write that link down, but if you just do a Google search, UTS Admission Schemes, you’ll find that area.
In terms of alternative pathways, and this is one of the key questions that students ask. If you don’t get the necessary ATAR for getting through our course, and you really want to do our course, what our students normally do is to do an equivalent course or a similar course at another university. The main ones would be Western Sydney Uni and UNSW, their courses. Many will go to Western Sydney because their ATAR is a fair bit lower. And what they do is they do the first year, and then they apply to come into our second year. And if they do reasonably well in their first year, they’ve got a reasonably good chance of getting into our course in second year. And we give credit for what they’ve studied in that first year. And what we find with those students is how we can adapt their program so they can come into our second year and still finish in the normal four year time frame. All right?
And with the ATAR, how we calculate that, it’s 100% of your tertiary results, what you might to do at say Western Sydney, were you in a study, or you HSC result, whichever is better. So if your ATAR wasn’t as good as you would hope, and you do well in your first year another uni, we’ll take your uni results to base your application for the second year. There’s also for non-school leavers, there’s what we call a Special Tertiary Admissions Test, STAT. So you can do a Google search on that. Okay, in terms of further information, there’s the details of the web link for the course. But what I’d like to do now is to now introduce Nick, Nick Tsai, who’s one of our star students. And so I’d just like to introduce Nick and perhaps Nick, if you could just introduce yourself briefly and just let everyone know what stage of the course you’re in.
Nick Tsai:
Yes. Hi, everyone, my name’s Nick. I’m in my first year at UTS studying Bachelor of Construction Project Management. I’ve just completed my first semester, so I’m currently in my second semester. I’m also a part of BEA, which is the Built Environment Association at UTS. And we run a lot of great events for students who do this degree, allowing them to network with people in industry. So if you guys want to check that out, it’s pretty cool as well.
Peter Smith:
Okay. That’s great. Yeah. That’s the Built Environment Association. That’s our student association, which is very, very active. And as Nick says, links students with industry, but also socially the network. And at the end of the day, your greatest resource in our course is going to be your fellow students. So that’s a really great initiative too, or an association too, for you to get to know each other even better. And Nick, when you were in school and you were thinking about doing a university course, what interests you about construction and UTS, our course?
Nick Tsai:
Well, UTS was always the uni I wanted to go to, but for this course, I heard from a lot of friends that this was the best one. And I’ve always been interested in sustainable buildings, so I thought this course would be the best fit for me.
Peter Smith:
Okay. That’s great. Yeah, because definitely the Built Environment has a huge impact on the environment. And it’s one of the great things with our professional field, is that you can definitely have an influence on our future because buildings have such an impact on the environment and there’s so many better ways of building, more sustainable ways of building. And we certainly cover that in quite a lot of detail in our course.
Alireza Ahmadian Fard Fini:
Peter, a couple of questions, important questions from the attendees here. I’ll read them to you. The first question is, “Hi, I am a carpenter looking at studying Construction Project Management in 2023. I will have, by that time construction carpentry certificate two, three before, and a diploma of building and construction, hoping to credit transfer straight into second year. I was wondering what the workload is like at that point and generally how well that someone with my level of experience would go at that stage?”
Peter Smith:
Okay. That’s a very good question. And we do get quite a number of what we call mature age students who’ve done previous study, have got work experience and then come into our course at a later stage. And that really adds a lot of value to our course because students like you have a lot of industry experience and bring a lot to the table in the classroom. You’ll definitely get credit recognition for your studies if you’ve done the diploma of building, you’ll get the equivalent of one year’s worth of subjects. It won’t be the complete first year, but we can adapt things so you get onto a normal or a good program as soon as possible. With industry experience, we only give recognition for industry experience, credit recognition, if the industry experience is six years or more. Okay? But in terms of adapting to the classroom, we’ve got very flexible attendance patterns, so part-time if you’re working full-time. We’ve got part-time patterns, it’s very, very flexible. So I’m sure you’ll do very well.
Alireza Ahmadian Fard Fini:
Yeah, the next question, because we don’t have that much time, I have to read very quickly. “Will this course industrial experience, in addition with the course content, allow us to apply and claim a builder’s license with no further study?”
Peter Smith:
Okay. So with the builder’s license, you certainly won’t need to do any further study, but with the New South Wales Department of Fair Trading, they look after the building license in the area. What you will need to demonstrate is a certain level of experience, so what your industry experience in the course will certainly count. But what you should do is look at the New South Wales Department of Fair Trading website because they have certain industry experience requirements. And so I think it’s a couple of years experience, so where we’ve got a requirement of 200 days. Okay? So they will require more experience and in specific areas, so that the course definitely meets the requirements.
Alireza Ahmadian Fard Fini:
Yeah. And the next question is… Let me… I just lost my document.
Peter Smith:
I can see there, there’s one if any issue in knowledge, there’s no issue of knowledge. So if you have done the HSC and all of that kind of thing. A lot of people think you need a lot of high level maths to do our course. That’s not the case. The level of maths in our course, I think is fairly straightforward. Students may disagree. But I think the most important skills coming from school is English, communication schools and so on.
Alireza Ahmadian Fard Fini:
That’s right.
Peter Smith):
I’m just mindful too, with Nick. What do you like most about the course, maybe giving some insights?
Nick Tsai:
What I like most about this course, I think currently my favorite subject would be digital built environment. We’re currently using Revit to make a floor plan for a house. Last semester, I’d say my favorite subject would be your subject Peter, introduction to build environment. That was pretty cool. And yeah.
Peter Smith:
Okay, thanks Nick. We’d arranged for Nick to say that. No, thanks. Thanks Nick. Okay. Any other questions here?
Alireza Ahmadian Fard Fini:
Yes, there is one more question that are with me, “Are subject adjustment points allocated automatically or do we have to apply for it?”
Peter Smith:
Yes. The special scheme set for the bonus points for your HSC subjects, they automatically calculate it. You don’t need to do anything for the females. That’s automatically calculated. There are other access things where you do need to apply for, and that might be the elite athlete or entertainer area. So just have a look at the website in detail, UTS Special Admission Schemes, but particularly the bonus points are automatically calculated.
Alireza Ahmadian Fard Fini:
And another question is, “How much experience is needed?” I reckon this is in reference to the graduation requirement of 200 days of industry experience, Peter, I guess.
Peter Smith:
Yeah. How much experience is needed, the minimum is 200 days through our course. And you can do that at any time over the four years, you don’t have to do it in the last year. You can start from first year. We usually recommend that students start getting that experience in second and third year, but before you start the course you don’t need any experience whatsoever. And roughly, I would say 90 to 95% of our students when they started, they had no industry experience at all. That’s where they’re coming from school.
Alireza Ahmadian Fard Fini:
And another question, “For the early entry program, as it only considers year 11 results for this course, what subjects are evaluated and what minimum grade do you need?”
Peter Smith:
Yeah. Okay, Jayden. That’s a good question. I must admit, I don’t really know the answer to that question. That’s more the University Students Center that would be able to answer that question because I don’t get involved with that side of things. So what I’d suggest you do there is you can ask that question to the Student Center, or we’ve also got a chat session that will continue after this, where you can ask that question again. That’s more a university-wide question. So the answer to that question would apply across all university courses. So if you could do that, that’d be great. So I’m sorry, I can’t give you the answer to that. I don’t know.
Jess:
Hey, Peter, just jumping in. I’ll post a link to the admissions chat directly in the chat now for those kinds of questions.
Peter Smith:
Yeah, great. Thanks, Jess.
Alireza Ahmadian Fard Fini:
And the last question is, Peter, also, they can probably refer to the university, the Student Center to get the answer for that. And that is related to the cost of the course over the four years of the study.
Peter Smith:
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And there’s last question there, when you say a full day plus one evening, you mean about 12 hours roughly. Most subjects, we have a timetable that facilitate students working in industry. And so what we normally comprised, most subjects are about a three hour duration. And rather than having say on a Monday, the one hour lecture and on another day a two hour tutorial, having to come in twice, we combine it all together into the one session. So there’ll be a combination of lecture, tutorials, all in that three hour package. And so we might have say, if you’re in year three, we might have a morning session for subjects, a one subject in the morning, 9:00 to 12:00, then another subject 01:00 to 04:00. And we might even have another subject say from 5:00 to 08:00, so you got three subjects on the one day. Now, it doesn’t always work that way. And then you come in for maybe another afternoon for your four subjects, or it could be another evening.
So we have a combination of day, evenings and so on. In first year, your subjects tend to be spread over two or three days, but once you get into second, third, and fourth year, we streamline your attendance so that it also facilitates you working in industry. Okay. Is that the last question?
Alireza Ahmadian Fard Fini:
Yes.
Jess:
That’s about all we have time for, which is perfect. So, great.
Peter Smith:
Okay. All right. Well, I’d like to thank Nick, in particular for taking the time out to give his insights and also Alireza for taking the time out. And he’s looking after our course this semester, so if you’ve got any further questions, by all means, you can email me, but also you can email Alireza as well. And I wish you all the best. It’s a big consideration what course to study and all of that kind of thing. So I know there’s a lot of things probably going through your minds and I acknowledge you’ve all had a tough last year and so on. And hopefully next year, when you’re hopefully studying our course here at UTS, the sun will be out. We’ll be traveling around, things will be hopefully back to as normal as possible and a really good time to start your uni studies. Okay. So all of the best to you all and enjoy the rest of the weekend.