During a recent CU Board of Regents meeting, VERTEX’s Chief Learning Officer, Russell Fitzpatrick, and CU Denver’s College of Engineering, Design and Computing Dean, Martin Dunn, led a discussion about the success of their partnership and what made it possible. “VERTEX and CU share a vision for the future that incorporates a lifetime of learning into a professional career.” said Russell Fitzpatrick, “With the speed of change in business today, our professionals are continually upskilling their abilities. By collaborating with CU, VERTEX is able to support the development of the scholar-practitioners of the future.”
The collaboration started in 2018 when VERTEX’s CEO, Bill McConnell, reached out to Caroline Clevenger, Associate Professor and Assistant Director of the CU Denver Construction Engineering Management program, about advancing his education. With similar visions for professional education, lifelong learning and engineering the smart cities of the future, Caroline Clevenger and Bill MConnell created an online masters program to provide flexible and customizable online modular credentials that modernize and add value to graduate degrees.
To further educate VERTEX employees through the Lifetime of Learning Program, CU Denver created two new online master’s degree programs for working professionals in the AEC industry. Students may pursue either a master of science/master of engineering in civil engineering with a construction engineering management specialization through the College of Engineering, Design and Computing, or a masters in management with a construction specialization through the CU Denver Business School.
VERTEX views the program as an opportunity to attract and retain top talent in an extremely competitive market and to develop their workforce through valuable professional certifications and advanced degrees. CU sees this partnership as the start of changes that universities will likely see in the future. Dr. Caroline Clevenger, Executive Director of CU’s construction engineering management program said, “All of us are trying to figure out what the university of the future is going to look like, and it’s going to change more rapidly than it has in the past, just like every sector is changing. This is the start of the kind of changes we’re going to see.”
Read more about this exciting partnership at the Denver Post