How Higher Education Prepares Workplace Managers: A New Discipline Wanted

Nowadays, the professional figure of “workplace manager” is achieving greater relevance due to changes affecting the nature of contemporary ways of working. Managing today’s workplace complexity requires professionals who can satisfy promptly a variety of user needs through an interdisciplinary approach ( World Economic Forum, 2018). Despite the emergent market demand, this profession is relatively young and its job description remains largely undefined in between many fields of knowledge (Appel-Meulenbroek, Clippard, & Pfnür, 2018). We undertook a large investigation of academic classes and professional courses in EU to understand the extent to which structured education programs are supporting the background of the future workplace managers. We compared about 490 academic classes in real estate and 20 professional courses through a desk research, and created a critical framework of the current educational offer. This analysis. Afterwards, data were cross-examined thanks to 10 interviews with workplace professionals. We found that few programs focus on workplace management, therefore educational courses cannot fully meet the market needs, yet. This lack is partially filled with professional courses, but they only consider some aspects of the workplace and miss a fundamental transdisciplinary approach. Consequently, our investigations suggest that education in workplace management should evolve and gain the relevance of an autonomous discipline. This would probably contribute to find a better match between the job market demand and the academic training.