Educational gap analysis between contemporary industry demand and universities state of the art in the construction logistics

The social challenges that are directly related to human health care and wellbeing became an obstacle for modern urban development and new city constructions, such as traffic congestion, noise, air pollution, and safety. The solution to overcome those barriers appeared to be in the proper organization of construction activities, particularly, in the construction logistics management. Hypothesis of this research suggest that modern construction logistics management cannot correspond social challenges as industry does not possess highly qualified staff, which questions current educational quality provided by institutions. Universities, therefore, search an answer what education needs to be provided to students to make specialists relevant to the contemporary construction industry, which requires coordination of activities and business processes within and between various organizations and sectors. The aim of this research is to find out if there is a need for development of the novel learning contents for the future workforce for effectively manage construction logistics, to analyze where is the gap between construction industry demands and state of the arts of universities in the construction logistics, and answers the following questions: What is the gap between educational state of the art in the construction logistics of leading universities and construction logistics practice? What is the educational state of the art in the construction logistics practice? And, what an education is demanded by the industry in the construction logistics practice? The hypothesis was checked based on cases selected from the three Western European countries. The case selection conducted according to replication logic of Robert Yin (2003), which considered selection and research of multiple cases that allows generalizing findings in Western European region. Following leading universities were selected: Royal Institute of Technology (SW), Northumbria University (UK), University of Twente, and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (NL). These universities were identified because of the existence of consistent courses and topics in the field of logistics and supply chain management, both, at Bachelor's and Master’s level. The research was hold according to methods used in the scientific paper of Sacks and Pikas (2013) where they studded educational gap analysis for Building Information Modeling (BIM). The methodology consist of six main steps, such as: (1) Preliminary literature review; (2) semi-structured interviews among the representatives of academia and industry; (3) development of comprehensive topics list for construction logistics; (4) online survey among the practitioners and evaluation of topics according to Bloom's cognitive dimensions; (5) in-depth interviews among the educators and evaluation of construction logistics related topics and courses according to Bloom's cognitive dimensions from 1 to 6; and final step (6) educational gap analysis. During this study researcher faced with limitations related to data collection from the university representatives. The lack of information was compensated by finding out alternative source of information, such as universities official web pages. The findings validated the hypothesis partially. The knowledge gap between the state of the art of universities and industry requirements in the construction logistics appeared to be through number of topics related to reverse logistical processes and construction activities that was completely excluded or only partially included in the selected study courses. In addition, it showed that some courses are not well balanced as either they do not reach out industry requirements or exceed the demand in provided quality. Finally, research shows that state of the art in construction logistics are number of courses focusing on general logistics and supply chain management, after which a student needs an additional time to specialize in the construction logistics. Research provides recommendations for the reduction of educational gap and development of novel learning content for the education of construction logistics managers, and for better utilization of educational capacities within the industry.