Abstract
Rapid socio-technological changes, greatly impacted by the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR), have made
today’s engineering environment complicated, unstable, unpredictable, competitive, and demanding. As
a result, most engineering firms have resorted to adopting the projectised organisational structure, which
allows them to achieve their business goals through projects. However, the success of projectised
organisations relies heavily on the competency of the project managers who happen to be engineers in
an engineering firm. Engineers are, therefore, now required to undertake project management duties in
addition to their traditional technical duties. Unfortunately, the literature shows that many engineers
have no intention of becoming project managers, and they fall into the profession without formal training
and professional certification. Consequently, many engineers struggle or fail as project managers
because they lack the social competencies required to manage projects, although they have good
technical competencies. This is because engineers are intrinsically technical people due to their intensive
technical education and training. Therefore, this research study was aimed at determining the social
competencies required for engineers to be competent project managers and the strategies for developing
such competencies in engineers.
To achieve this aim, quantitative survey research was adopted. Initially, a literature review was
conducted to determine the critical social competencies and strategies to develop such competencies by
examining and studying several published research papers. Several social competencies were identified
from the literature; therefore, to determine the most critical competencies, the competencies mentioned
in several different selected research papers were deemed critical. To narrow down these critical
competencies further, they were subjected to code co-occurrence analysis using Atlas.ti to determine the
relationship between these competencies. The competencies with high code co-occurrences, i.e. those
with a good and positive relationship with each other, were finally regarded as the critical social
competencies for project managers. In addition, strategies to develop such critical competencies were
determined. To verify the findings of the literature review, data was collected through questionnaires
from the target population, which consisted of graduate/junior engineers and senior engineering
professionals. Based on the triangulation of collected data with literature review findings, seven social
competencies were identified as critical to project managers, and these are communication, teamwork,
leadership, self-management, problem-solving, decision-making and flexibility. In addition, action
learning, cooperative learning, problem-based learning, coaching, recreational or social activities and
restorative practices were found to be the best strategies for developing these critical competencies.
Keywords: Project Management, Engineering Project Management, Engineering Management, Project
Management Social Competencies, Project Management Competencies Development