Project Manager Certification

There are three steps required to get project manager certification: post-secondary education, project management experience, and the certification examination. A project manager is responsible for directing a team of professionals to complete a specific project within a predetermined time frame and budget. Project management certification is becoming increasingly important for a wide range of professionals, ranging from engineers to construction managers.

People who want to get project manager certification have usually been working in their area of expertise for several years and have both the academic credentials and work experience required to be considered for management positions. Project manager certification is granted by the Project Management Institution®. Successful graduates can use the designation PMP® (Project Management Professional®) after their name on business cards and related stationary. This certification is internationally recognized for providing a high level of training in project management.

The first step toward getting a project manager certification is to complete a post-secondary education program. An undergraduate degree is not mandatory, but is a great benefit, reducing the number of years of experience required. The discipline of the degree is irrelevant when obtaining project management certification. It is important to note that project management is typically a mid-career transition. Employers rarely provide new graduates with the opportunities to manage a project, given their limited working experience and the level of risk.

A minimum of three years’ project management experience is required before you are eligible to write the project management certification examination. This must be verifiable project management experience, where you are solely responsible for a project from planning to implementation. This type of experience is usually earned over a period of four to five calendar years. Most people who have obtained the required experience are at least ten years into their career.

The project management certification examination is four hours in length and is 400 multiple choice questions. Many associations offer preparation courses and seminars to help students prepare for this exam. This exam is notoriously difficult, covering a wide range of topics in both practical and theoretical project management subjects. Research the exam preparation options available to you, and be sure to check the accreditation status of the school before paying the fee.

Upon successful completion of the project management certification, candidates can look for employment opportunities as project managers, set up their own consulting firm, or work for in a project manager role for a company. This type of certification is often required to advance a professional services career into the managerial level

Master of Engineering Degree in United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, the Master Engineering (M.Eng) is an undergraduate award, available after pursuing a four or five year course of study. These are taught courses, with only a small research element in the third and/or final year, and are not available as postgraduate qualifications in most cases. Most British universities offer both the traditional three or four year courses in engineering, leading to a B.Sc. or B.Eng, and a M.Eng respectively.

Some universities, such as Brunel University, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London, offer only the four year M.Eng, although even these make provision for leaving at the end of the third year. For those who leave after three years or fail the fourth year, a B.Sc is awarded. The Open University run the MEng study as a postgraduate degree requiring a BEng to be completed, at most, 2 years prior.

The Engineering Council Postgraduate Diploma is set at the final year of a British MEng. The MEng is now a mandatory requirement for application to become a Chartered Engineer.

n terms of course structure, M.Eng degrees usually follow the pattern familiar from bachelor’s degrees with lectures, laboratory work, coursework and exams each year. There is usually a substantial project to be completed in the fourth year which may have a research element to it, and a more teaching-based project to be completed in the third year. At the end of the third year, there is usually a threshold of academic performance in examinations to allow progression to the final year. At some universities, the structure of the final year is rather different from that of the first three, for example, at the University of York, the final year for the Computer Systems and Software programme consists entirely of project work and intensive advanced seminar courses rather than traditional lectures and problem classes. Final results are, in most cases, awarded on the standard British undergraduate degree classification scale, although some universities award something structurally similar to ‘Distinction’, ‘Merit’, ‘Pass’ or ‘Fail’ as this is often the way that taught postgraduate master’s degrees are classified.

At some universities in the U.K. in the early 1980s, the M.Eng was awarded as a taught postgraduate degree after 12 months of study. Its entry requirements would typically be like those for other taught postgraduate courses, including holding an undergraduate degree, and its format would be similar to the modern M.Eng although, as with many postgraduate master’s degrees, the project would extend over a longer period. M.Eng courses in their modern, undergraduate form were introduced in the mid-1980s in response to growing competition from technical-degree graduates from continental Europe, where degree courses are often longer than the usual three years in the U.K. There was a feeling among recent graduates, the engineering institutions, employers and universities, that the longer and more in-depth study offered on the continent needed to be made available to U.K. students as well. Since to obtain a taught master’s degree in the U.K. typically took an additional year beyond a bachelor’s degree, it was decided that this extra year would be integrated into the undergraduate program and, instead of pursuing both a bachelor’s and master’s degree, students would proceed directly to a master’s degree.

Since its introduction, the M.Eng has become the degree of choice for most undergraduate engineers, as was intended. The most common exception to this is international students who, because of the substantially higher fees they are charged, sometimes opt to take the tradition B.Eng/B.Sc. route where that is available. Most of the engineering institutions have now made an M.Eng the minimum academic standard necessary to become a Chartered Engineer. Graduates who graduated before the changes in the rules will still be allowed to use their bachelor’s degree for this purpose and those who have earned a bachelor’s degree since the changes can usually take some additional courses (known as ‘matching sections’) over time to reach an equivalent standard to the M.Eng.

Lightweight Concrete Production

1. Introduction to light weight concrete

Lightweight concrete is mainly used as back-filling material. When talking about lightweight concrete, we refer to a concrete of which its specific gravity (density) is much more lower than normal concrete.

Basically normal concrete: 2.35 – 2.42 ton/m3 while lightweight concrete 0.80-1.40 t/m3.

Therefore final strength is not issue. Expected final strength would be usually lower 5 MPa at 28 dasy as such concrete contained of lot of air entrained.

The strength would be affected by type of lightweight aggregate to used.

2. Production Principle

Basically there are 2 ways to produce light weight concrete.

a. Cement/ Water/Sand/lightweight aggregate/ chemical additives (admixtures)

b. Cement/ Water/ Sand/ Chemical additives

By lightweight aggregate we can consider polystyrene balls, expanded clay for instance.  Chemical additives, we mainly means special air entrained agent such as Sika Lightcrete 1-500VP. This admixture ca entrained safely up to 30% of air entrained into the mix.

As per the use of the special air entrained, usually, the mix is batched for a designed volume the air entrained is measured in order to determine final volume of the concrete batched. Indeed in term of concrete production it is important to know about about which volume we are talking, we are referring to:

For instance: Expected air entrained 30%

Volume of fresh batch 1000 liters -> initial ar development 30% –> final hard volume ~1.3 m3