Professional Development

Continuing Education Units (CEUs)

The Continuing Education Unit (CEU) is a nationally recognized unit of measurement for participation in non-credit continuing education programs. Through the CEIE Departmental Seminar series and through other events, workshops, and programs, CEUs are available to participating students and professionals. Where applicable, available CEUs and Professional Development Hours (PDHs) will be listed with our events.

Workshops

Is there a place for entrepreneurship in the public sector?  The Civil Environmental and Infrastructure Engineering Department at GMU answers with a resounding “yes”.  The CEIE Department developed a “Technical Entrepreneurship in the Federal Government” certificate program to help public sector engineering professionals develop an entrepreneurial management style.  CEIE has partnered with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Headquarters for the past 5 years to offer the certificate program.  To date, 12 students have successfully completed the program.  Students are instructed how to be entrepreneurial within the public sector, how to be engineering leaders, and how to apply accepted best engineering management practices.   The recently completed entrepreneurship class produced the following three project concepts that are currently being pursued by USACE. 

Mandatory Project Manager Certification
This program involves the development of mandatory certification requirements for all USACE project/managers.  The level of certification required would be based on the complexity of the project. Centralized funding for all associated training and certification process (i.e., costs associated with taking qualifying exams such as the Project Management Institute PMP and CAPM) are a mandatory component of this project concept. 

National Level Certification
This project was developed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in an effort to minimize future hurricane impacts associated with levees.  The program is designed to cover all US levees.  Design standards, current condition assessment methods, responsibility for O&M, established cost estimation processes for levee studies, and a benefit/risk analysis are included in this developed program. 

River Pass
This project, judged best in the class, proposes an E-Z pass for barges and tugboats which represents true modernization of the inland waterways systems.
Every barge and tugboat would have an electronic River pass attached to it that contains a GPS and information about the cargo carried.

Benefits include:

• Management and alleviation of congestion at locks. As the barges move through the inland waterway system, they can be tracked by a ‘River Traffic Controller’. Messages can be sent to the pilot advising him/her of queues at upcoming locks, so speed can be controlled and tows can be spaced out along the river.
• Fast, accurate collection of waterborne commerce data. Sensors at each lock would record passage of each barge, transmitting the information instantly to the completely automated data collection systems of the Navigation Data Center.
• An alternative way to collect the Inland Waterways Fuel Tax based directly on actual use of the system

For more information about Professional Development opportunities with CEIE, please contact Dr. Sharon deMonsabert.