• Corpus ID: 44194094

CONSIDERING LEARNING, UNLEARNING IN PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR CONSTRUCTION PROJECT MANAGERS: A PILOT STUDY

@inproceedings{Esa2011CONSIDERINGLU,
  title={CONSIDERING LEARNING, UNLEARNING IN PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR CONSTRUCTION PROJECT MANAGERS: A PILOT STUDY},
  author={Muneera Esa and Zulkiflee Bin Abdul Samad},
  year={2011}
}

• M. Esa, Z. Samad
• Published 2011
• Engineering, Business

As projects face higher degrees of technical complexity and interdependency across functional boundaries, they require a shift towards an information-based organization and a knowledge-creating structure to enable them to integrate the people involved effectively. The essence of 'professional' project management lies in the ability continually to enhance the underlying knowledge base—the learning capacity. Successful business organizations do not just have to learn. Sometimes they have to unlearn. Creating an unlearning organization is the imperative for facilitating the journey of improvements. The purpose of this paper is to explore the level of consideration given to the approach of learning and unlearning during professional development interventions for construction project managers. A self-administered questionnaire was given to a small sample of construction project managers in Jabatan Kerjaraya Malaysia. The quantitative data was analyzed through descriptive statistics which was conducted to identify whether project managers considering the learning and unlearning approach as part of project management professional development. The results revealed that project managers considering learning as a part of professional development because it improves working skill and help in encouraging experiential learning in order to improve the level of professional competence. But somehow, for unlearning approach, it seems they are not considering unlearning as an alternative tool in professional development due to the majority of the respondents who reluctant to give up old habit which is a great barrier in improving and upgrading new skills to supports innovation in the industry. But the low response rate due to the pilot study purpose, the results are not statically generalizable. This paper which reports on a pilot study perspective begins to address the lack of empirical research on the concept of learning and unlearning which indicates a need for further research in this area as one of the competencies which seems crucial in dynamic and uncertain environments for professional development.