Canada’s construction sector faces a critical skills shortage – one that a new course from Humber Polytechnic in Ontario aims to address head-on. The Project Coordinator for Construction (PCC) program is a 16-hour micro-credential course that combines online and in-person learning. It covers organizing subcontractor work, interpreting bid packages, understanding construction drawings, synthesizing trade schedules and essential soft skills such as stakeholder communication and cross-functional collaboration.
While these skills are essential, most project co-ordinators receive little formal training. Humber’s PCC course will be one of the first of its kind in Canada when it rolls out this fall. Course developers Greg Cicovacki and William Horton say the college identified this need after discussions with construction industry partners, who indicated that weak co-ordination often leads to delays and cost overruns.
“By putting together these micro-credentials, the idea is that we can equip prospective or current project co-ordinators with all the skills they need, all the knowledge they need … so that things can stay on-time and can stay on-budget,” said Horton, who is also the college’s manager of educational support and digital innovation. “In construction, those are huge.”
The PCC course is a hybrid education model that incorporates both online and in-person learning components. The online program consists of modules on bidding, construction drawings and scheduling, aligned with the Universal Design for Learning framework. Learners move at their own pace, guided by a fictional mentor named Terry, and engage with content in ways that suit their strengths. The eight-hour in-person classroom sessions have been designed to encourage learners to think critically and offer opportunities to apply the knowledge they’ve learned in work-based scenarios. The classroom sessions will be conducted by trained industry professionals.
Cicovacki, who previously worked in construction, says the Universal Design for Learning framework allows anyone to learn the course content, regardless of their preferred learning style. “Not everybody can do multiple choice, not everybody can write a coherent paragraph. That limits the accessibility for those learners,” he said.
“This course was built so that even if it’s somebody in the construction industry who is mid-career and they don’t do computers … it has accessibility built into it to remove any barriers to learning online. It handles the visual, audio, reading, writing and kinesthetic aspects of what a learner needs to grasp the content and move on with it and be ready for day one on the job.”
“By putting together these micro-credentials, the idea is that we can equip prospective or current project coordinators with all the skills they need, all the knowledge they need … so that things can stay on-time and can stay on-budget.”
William Horton, Humber Polytechnic
Part of what sets the PCC micro-credential course apart from other programs is its tailored focus on the construction industry, in contrast to more generic project co-ordination training. The curriculum was shaped through direct consultations with industry professionals and national organizations focused on construction workforce development and innovation, ensuring relevance to industry needs. Horton and Cicovacki also interviewed new project co-ordinators about problems they encountered on the job and how the course could help address those challenges.
Horton says the ultimate benefit of the program is preparing learners to step onto a jobsite with confidence and immediately contribute to project success. “Our goal is that somebody who’s maybe being onboarded or is new in the field or is inexperienced can come in and take this course, and when they go out in the field, they go, ‘Oh, yeah, I get it now. I know what that bid package is, I know what the page turn is,’ and things like that.”
CourseCompare, an online educational platform, helped market the PCC course by integrating labour market mapping, audience targeting and data-driven recruitment to connect organizations and learners with in-demand training. CEO Robert Furtado says his company will support marketing the course through a targeted recruitment plan, national awareness campaigns and direct employer engagement to connect learners to high-opportunity careers in construction. The online course’s case study is based on a courthouse renovation, focusing on six construction aspects: demolition, electrical, mechanical, drywall, painting, doors and corner guards.
While the course doesn’t specifically address the deep foundation aspect of construction, there have been discussions about adding it as a separate micro-credential program in the future. This modular, stackable approach to credentialing is a unique feature that allows learners to build towards a comprehensive certificate by accumulating targeted skills through multiple construction-related micro-credentials.
“We want to take this model, and we want to start using it in a lot of different ways so that people can see that it’s a cool way of teaching this information. Maybe they feel [their] area’s a little different. We could do one that’s specific for [them], and we can build on this and iterate and create as many versions as we can to make sure that we’re capturing as many organizations as possible and make sure they’re supported,” said Horton.
Cicovacki and Horton both say they are pleased with how the final course design came together, especially the online portion, which they hope will make learning the subject matter enjoyable and accessible. “Our team has put so much thought into what that learner is going to see, pulling them in visually, making them motivated to keep learning and making sure they feel respected and that they feel this was built for them,” Horton said.
“We want anybody that looks at this to forget that they’re learning online. We want the learner to go through this and laugh and say ‘Here are their points’ and do the activities and say, ‘I had no clue online learning [would] be like this. I want to take another course with these guys,’” Cicovacki said, laughing.