Development of a professional doctoral programme in built environment to enhance societal resilience to disasters

Integrating disaster resilience into education is a key factor for reducing the adverse impact of future
disasters. This paper in this context presents the methodology of developing an innovative professional
doctoral programme (DProf) that integrates professional and academic knowledge in the built
environment to enhance societal resilience to disasters. The DProf programme addresses the career
needs of practicing professionals, particularly those in, or who aspire to, senior positions within the
construction industry and caters for the researching professional. In developing the DProf
programme, a detailed market needs analysis for built environment stakeholders to increase societal
resilience to disasters was conducted capturing inter-disciplinary needs across a range of stakeholders
and countries. A series of semi-structured interviews on current and emerging market needs with
members of six built environment related stakeholders, namely, local and national governments;
community; NGOs, INGOs and other international agencies; academia and research organisations;
and private sector facilitated the aforementioned analysis. Qualitative data analysis techniques were
employed in analysing the interview data. The findings of the interviews revealed the current and
emerging needs and skills of the six stakeholders related to built environment professionals towards
enhancing social, economic, technological, environmental and institutional dimensions of disaster
resilience of societies. These findings were used to develop the approp