Measuring Human Intellectual Capital Transfer in HEI-Industry Engagements

Several researchers perceive the construction industry as a knowledge based, value creating sector of the economy. There is an emerging importance placed on human resource management in the construction industry, as one of labour intensive sectors of the economy. The issue of the critical role played by employees in fostering an effective construction business has often been overlooked over the years. The capacity a company to create wealth is
based on the knowledge and capabilities of its people, particularly in professional services. Therefore, value is added to companies by recruiting new staff with higher levels of knowledge and/or through developing the knowledge of the existing workforce. Increasingly, the construction industry demands a professionally qualified workforce especially in the field of project management, engineering, estimating, surveying and contract management. Employer
engagement is one of the initiatives to encourage higher education institutes to develop better graduates by improving curriculum through construction industry participation. However, benchmarking performance of employer engagements remains elusive in the absence of credible, independent and quantitative measures. Hence, this research attempts to develop a theory for effective human resource management and to construct a simplistic model to help the industry practitioners to select appropriate personnel. While expert workshop was used for exploratory stage a short questionnaire was used to understand the behaviour of various human knowledge capital variables to form a simplistic model.