A Valencian Engineer at the Heart of Project Management in Spain
One of the reasons that Spanish engineers can so easily work in other countries is that international certification is proof of their abilities. Spanish certification of Project Management has its base in Valencia.
AEIPRO was created in 1993 as a non-profit-making civil association, whose main goal was to bring together professionals from industry and the academic world, mainly engineers, in order to ensure that the highest possible standards of project management and project engineering could be achieved and, following AEIPRO’s incorporation into the International Project Management Association (IPMA), certified by an internationally recognised system of assessment.
AEIPRO is the Spanish representative of IPMA, which was founded in Vienna in 1965. What started out as a forum to allow project management practitioners to learn, network and propose ideas, has since become a prestigious organisation with over 50,000 members in 55 countries.
The Spanish hub of this worldwide wheel can be found in the office of Salvador Capuz, whose international experience was previously forged through his work during 5 years as Vice Rector of Valencia Polytechnic University, responsible for Iber-American co-operation.
Salvador Capuz, professor of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering at Valencia’s Polytechnic University and AEIPRO board member since 1997, has been President of AEIPRO (the Spanish association of project managers) since May 2008, when his colleague Eliseo Gomez Senent, creator of the Valencia Rice Museum, stepped down after three years as President.
In July 2016 Salvador was re-elected for another 4 year term.
One keystone to the success and international recognition of IPMA and AEIPRO is certification, a process by which project managers can demonstrate after thorough testing, that they are qualified to a high level; a factor which renders their services doubly valuable to their companies, who are fighting for tenders in an increasingly competitive market place.
The purpose of the certification process is to evaluate how effectively competency is applied in the workplace, ascertain if knowledge and skills are applied appropriately and to ensure that the project manager’s attitude is suitable for achieving the performance level required by the task at hand.
From the project manager’s point of view, certification also helps to identify the professional’s own skills and his or her own weaknesses, for the purposes of self-improvement and further study.
Spain now has over 600 professionals certified by AEIPRO, which also acts as an employment source for its members by circulating among them information about job opportunities.
Special emphasis is paid to young members, who have a youth section called ‘Young Crew’, focusing on their specific concerns.
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