Explore Property, Construction and Project Management

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Ron Wakefield: Hello. I'm Ron Wakefield, and I'm the dean of the School of Property, Construction, and Project Management here at our RMIT. I've been the dean of the school for 15 years. I'm a professor of construction and a nationally registered engineer. I teach into the three programs I'll be talking about today, and I'm an active researcher in construction management.

Today. I'm going to tell you about the three undergraduate programs offered by the school: the bachelor's degrees in property, construction management, and project management. The school also offers master's degrees and a doctorate of philosophy. I'm going to tell you today about the structure of the degrees, the type of study, and projects involved in the programs, as well as the potential employment outcomes you have during and when you complete the degree. It's my privilege to be part of the school and the learning community at RMIT, and I look forward to welcoming you to one of our programs.

Wominjeka. The School of Property, Construction, and Project Management is all about learning about the built environment, and how we build roads, buildings, and infrastructure. Today, cities need much more innovatively and carefully planned infrastructure to create livable and sustainable communities that we can our use into the future. RMIT's property and construction project management courses connect you with industry mentors to help you gain professional skills required to shape finance and manage the urban spaces we work in living.

At an undergraduate level, we offer three degrees: Bachelor of Applied Science (Construction Management) (Honours), Bachelor of Applied Science (Project Management) (Honours), and Bachelor of Applied Science (Property and Valuation) (Honours). Property evaluation will help you gain an understanding of how to read property markets, analyze data, and the necessary skills to create value manage investments, and create developments.

Construction management is focused on the building process and delivering construction projects safely while managing stakeholders, budgets, timelines. And it applies to both the commercial, residential, and other infrastructure type developments. Project management is a more general form of management that focuses on how to manage complex projects across a range of industries. You can gain organizational skills, analytical skills, and communication skills to manage things like costing, scheduling, process changes, and risk management.

The entry requirements for the degrees are as follows. For Bachelor of Applied Science in Construction Management, the ATAR last year was 80. You need to study VCE units three and four, a study score in English of at least 30, and 25 in other English scores. You need to do VCE units three and four, and a study score of at least 20 in any mathematics. Bachelor of Applied Science in Project Management Honours has the same prerequisites, but an eight hour cutoff of 75 last year. And the Bachelor of Applied Science in Property and Valuation also has the same prerequisites, but a cutoff score of 75.25.

Besides coming straight from school, there's other pathways into our degrees, through the diploma of building construction or the advanced diploma of building design architectural. These pathway programs apply to all of the programs in our school. To construction management, the diploma of building and construction takes two years, and then you have two and a half years in the degree to give a total of four and a half years. For project management and property and valuation, you'll get two years credit, but you'll need to do three years of our study in the bachelor's program, giving a total of five years.

The slide in front of you now shows the courses that are available across the four years of the programs. You'll see from the three slides following that the first year in all three programs ... construction management, project management, and property and valuation are common. The purpose of this is to allow you to get an understanding of the whole of the built environment programs in your first year. And many students aren't quite sure which program they want to take. At the end of the first year, assuming you pass everything, you're able to transfer into one of our other programs. It also ensures that all students have this good, basic grounding in both property and valuation, construction management, and project management.

The next slide shows the same cost structure for project management, and the third slide shows the structure for property and valuation. Some of the things that are really good about RMIT are our facilities. We teach in mostly in small classes, no more than 50 students a class. We use our particular facilities for teaching that. Amongst the new facilities we've developed in the last few years, our facilities for using virtual and augmented reality to enable building construction and understanding the construction process.

We use that immersive environment gives students a really good understanding of access to construction sites, construction processes, and how to execute those processes safely. Students can do that in class or outside class at their own pace. Linked with that is a full building information modeling system that allows you to learn the state of the art of how to manage construction and built environment processes. It's equivalent to all of our programs.

To give you an example of the sort of things you can do with the building information modeling, in these last two years we've had a program sponsored by Navisworks where 15 construction management students from RMIT worked with 15 students from National University of Singapore in a immersion project, where they build a full beam model of a constructed facility. There's many opportunities to do that type of study in your program.

There's a profile here on the next slide that talks about what a property student is looking for in the program, and there'll be plenty of opportunities during the open day process to talk to students who are currently in the program, and talk to staff about the experiences they have, and also what opportunities there are for you in the program.

Most of our students actually work while they're studying. If not in the first year, in the second or third year, it's quite easy for students to get work placements ... paid work placements, with our industry partners. There's also opportunities to do both local work placements and international work placements in our partner programs in Hong Kong, Singapore, and also in India. There's a lot of opportunity to work with industry professionals in that way. Of course, during the course courses themselves, we have a lot of field trips and field practice. There's a real opportunity to obtain mentoring from industry professionals.

The other thing I'd like to highlight in the presentation on the next slide is the industry connections that we have in the program. About seven or eight years ago, we set up an Employer of Choice program to link students with alumni and employers who are interested in employing our students, both while they're studying and post-graduation. Currently, we've got over 250 employers signed up to that program. And part of the employers joining the program, they agree to actually provide experience that's relevant to where students are in the course, and also to put students study above the work. They will allow people to leave work to attend class, they will provide supportive activities in the workplace.

It's been a really fantastic program, and it's led for all of our programs having very close to full employment of students upon graduation. You can find out much more about that program by going to the web address there that's linked to our website, and all of the employers on that website then have links to their own website where you'll be able to see the type of work that they do, and the kind of opportunities that are available. I've found that to be a very helpful thing for students who are looking and interested in these careers. They can find there's many niches that you can fit into, and you'll be able to find that by looking at those websites through the Employer of Choice program.

I thought it might be also interesting for you to hear a little bit about the research projects that we do in the school. Our school is very industry connected, and we've got many research projects that are funded by industry and government. Three examples that I'd like to give you today is the work we're doing on use of building-integrated photovoltaics, where photovoltaic cells are integrated into the envelope of the building to allow the building to generate electricity. The idea is this will contribute to a zero energy buildings in the future.

Other work we've done recently include research into safe crane operation, determining guidelines for how operators can operate cranes on construction sites safely. And that work was funded by SafeWork for New South Wales. And one of the more interesting and different programs we have is some of our property staff are doing research into property rights in outer space. It's new research with the Space Agency in Australia. These projects indicate that we're at the cutting edge of the industry practice, and the people who are teaching you in the program will also be at that point in their professional lives.

I've already mentioned the global partners we have, and there's many opportunities for you if you come to RMIT to go into an international exchange program. At any time, we've got approximately 50 students on international exchange. That's when the pandemic isn't on. But with the pandemic, obviously that's somewhat disrupted. It's a really good opportunity for you while you're studying to go and study at an international university, and get an experience that allows you to compare both the study that we do in Australia, but also the industry in those other countries. I think it's a really fantastic opportunity that RMIT offers to students.

The sort of careers that you could end up being in after doing these programs ... and if you take advantage of the Employer of Choice program, you can try out these things while you're a student. Construction Management students end up as site managers, construction managers where they'd be looking over a whole portfolio of sites, quantity surveyors, project managers, and contract administrators.

Property and Valuation students often work for property funds that are worked for the superannuation funds managing their property portfolio. They also work as property developers, analysts for properties, valuers, and asset and property managers. As I said earlier, the Project Managers work in a broad range of projects, managing complex projects across the whole economy. We have Project Management students who go into project management in information technology, in banking, in event management, in many different areas.

The important dates for you to remember is our 2021 orientation will be 22nd to 26th of February. Classes next year will begin on 1st of March, and the last day late enroll, though we hope none of you do that, is the 8th of March. Thanks for taking the time to listen today. For more information about property construction and project management at RMIT, check out our website, or call STUDY at RMIT on 9925 2260. Also, feel free to contact me by email at ronwakefield@rmit.edu.au.

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