Abstract
Graduate students preparing for project-based professions often have strong technical skills but little exposure to organizational strategy, client behavior, or professional judgment. This creates a challenge for instructors: how do you help adult learners develop strategic thinking before they have significant workplace experience? This paper describes the approach used in Columbia University’s graduate course Strategic Management in Engineering & Construction. The course is organized around a sequence of real cases drawn from professional practice. Each case presents a dilemma involving roles, responsibilities, risk, and uncertainty. By analyzing these situations, students begin to understand how project-based organizations function and how professionals make decisions in environments shaped by clients, delivery structures, and evolving project conditions. Instead of relying on abstract strategy models, the course emphasizes concrete scenarios, guided discussion, short written reflections, and comparisons across cases. These methods help students build their own understanding of strategic issues and develop early awareness of how organizations behave. Although rooted in engineering examples, this approach can apply to any project-based professional field. The paper shares observations from teaching the course and offers a practical model for helping early-career adults develop strategic insight before entering the workforce.
Presenters
Julius ChangSenior Lecturer, Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Columbia University, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Adult, Community, and Professional Learning
KEYWORDS
STRATEGIC THINKING, PROFESSIONAL LEARNING, PROJECT-BASED PROFESSIONS, CASE-BASED LEARNING
