Professional doctorates: Applicability to the construction industry in increasing societal resilience to disasters

This paper aims to analyse the applicability of professional doctorates to the construction industry in developing societal resilience. Based on an extensive review of literature, the paper introduces the concept of professional doctoral programmes and its applicability to the construction industry in developing societal resilience to disasters.

The concept of professional doctoral programmes overcomes the shortcomings of traditional doctoral programmes in addressing the needs of the construction industry and have been considered as more appropriate in developing the knowledge and skills of construction professionals. 

With the increase in occurrence of high impact disasters, the role of Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) in enhancing the disaster related knowledge and skills of construction professionals is highly recognised. HEIs are expected to contribute to both theory and practice in the development of societal resilience to disasters through the development of curricular and modules to update the knowledge and skills that employees have obtained in the past. Doctoral education is identified as one of the methods in upgrading the knowledge of the construction professionals in this regard.