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This exploratory research examines who supports what aspects of career development on projects. Our main finding is that, although project professionals receive support from formal and informal sources, a compensatory mechanism is at play. When support does not come from direct line managers, project professionals are compelled to initiate informal practices, including mentoring, buddy systems, and communities of practice. Practical implications arise for organizations regarding how to ensure sufficient mechanisms are in place to compensate for lack of line management career support and to allow project professionals to access the development opportunities they need by supporting their self-initiated efforts. Project Management Institute

We explore publishing trends regarding HRM and PBO in the main journals in the field of project management to highlight key empirical and theoretical contributions during the period 1996–2016. We offer three contributions to the field of project management. The first is theoretical where we analyze twenty years of research in key project management journals by adapting and extending the framework of Wright and Boswell (2002), and identifying categories of HRM research at three levels of analysis. This analysis provides an overview integrating exemplary research to date on the HRM-PBO link at different levels, showing areas where research is well-developed and also areas that, while promising, have not been examined in a systematic manner to date. Our second contribution is that we highlight a variety of theoretical as well as methodological resources from the HRM field that can be applied in project studies and in so doing promote cross-fertilization of ideas and approaches between these two fields. Finally, a key managerial contribution is that we introduce the project as a temporary organization level of analysis, explicitly making visible HRM practices on the project. This can guide both HRM practitioners, and project managers, in terms of the importance of projects as sites for human resource management and employment activities including careers, employee participation and employment relations all of which are critical issues and deserve more attention.

It is increasingly common for work activities to take place in projects, and projects are therefore of growing importance as sites for career development, for leading and managing professional workers, and for individual and organizational development. Links between human resource management (HRM) activities that occur on projects, and their broader implications for project-based organizations in terms of knowledge, learning, and competence development, are therefore important foci for research. Projects are also important from the perspective of the well-being, ethical treatment, and motivation of workers. Projects are established within and between organizational functions (Bredin & Söderlund, 2011) but also span organizational boundaries (Lundin & Steinthórsson, 2003; Swart & Kinnie, 2014). Projects involve people from within and between organizational departments and also within and between disciplinary specialties. The implications of project-based organizing for managing human resources would appear to be significant (Huemann, 2015; Keegan, Huemann, & Turner, 2012; Palm & Lindahl, 2015; Söderlund & Bredin, 2006; Vicentini & Boccardelli, 2014), and yet traditional HRM models, where projects are not a key consideration, continue to dominate mainstream HRM theorizing (Swart & Kinnie, 2014). In mainstream HRM theorizing, traditional long-term and stable employment relationships are assumed and focal organizations are those with clearly defined internal and external boundaries. Project management literature has also traditionally downplayed what could be called the human factor – human capital or people aspects of project organization and management (Keegan & Turner, 2003). A shift from the mainly technical to increasingly people-focused aspects of project management has, however, been discernible in the past decade (Huemann, Keegan, & Turner, 2007). Project management researchers have started to explore more systematically HRM issues and their possible contribution to the performance of organizations that do most of their work in projects (Bredin & Söderlund, 2011). The systematic study of project professionals’ careers has developed recently, reflecting an increased appreciation of the importance of projects as a major part of many organizations (Crawford, French, & Lloyd-Walker, 2013; Hölzle, 2010) and the resulting increased importance of HRM issues and “people capabilities” (Bredin, 2008) required of project-based organizations is slowly increasing. Similarly, even though HRM theorists have not, to date, fully embraced the importance of the project context for practices, processes, and outcomes, this too appears to be changing as studies of HRM become more contextually sensitive.

This paper debates upon the adoption of a social learning platform to support the highly dynamic industry of consumer electronics' providers, acknowledging the role of emerging technologies on the delivery of efficient lifelong learning solutions. The discussion is based on mixed research methods, in which structured interviews and online questionnaires were used and customized for various stakeholders of such a social learning platform within the Danube region: students, professors, representatives of career development centers of universities and private companies. Having a clear regional value, the conclusions can still easily be extended to the world-wide current context, in which individuals are challenged to constantly further develop, to stay attractive on the labour market and aligned with continuously changing trends of digital age.

Human resource management (HRM) can be viewed as core processes of the project-oriented company, affecting the way the organization acquires and uses human resources, and how employees experience the employment relationship. Knowledge about HRM is produced by researchers and theorists who, through publishing their work in books and journals, construct knowledge in particular ways and in so doing frame the way HRM debates take shape in the academic and practitioner literatures. In most of the extant literature HRM is framed primarily in terms of large, stable organisations, while other organisational types, such as, those relying on projects as the principle form of work design, are marginalised in discussions about what HRM is and how it should be practiced. The authors argue that due to specific characteristics of the project-oriented company, particularly the temporary nature of the work processes and dynamic nature of the work environment, there exist specific challenges for both organisations and employees for HRM in project-oriented companies, and that these have – been neither widely acknowledged nor adequately conceptualised in the extant mainstream HRM or project management literatures. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of past research on HRM in the context of projects, published in the project management, general management, and HRM literatures. We develop a model of what we see as the critical HRM aspects of project-oriented organizing, based on prior research and use it to structure the review. Finally we summarize what we see as the major shortcomings of research in the field of HRM in the project-oriented company and outline a research agenda to address outstanding areas of research on this topic.

The Theory of Production Competence (TPC) established the link between operational competence and organizational performance for repetitive operations; however, this link has never been established for projects and project-based operations (PBOs) despite their importance and ubiquity. This paper uses established theory on production competence in PBOs to explore whether and under what conditions it holds in PBOs. ‘Organizational project competence’ (OPC) describes the fit between organizational requirements for project delivery, and its capabilities to deliver projects.We identify four dimensions of competence: transformational, commercial, technical and network competence. It has specificity along four non-exclusive dimensions of competence: delivering technical projects, competence to deliver projects as a business and through networks, and to achieve transformation through projects. We report on four organizations who, over time, both gained and lost OPC. Operations choice of human resources, infrastructure and processes were associated with changes in competence. Competence gains required considerable effort and occurred over extended time periods, but losses were achieved with relative ease and quickly. We develop a framework for aligning project resources with strategic requirements and suggest not just that such an approach is effective for project-based operations, but under what conditions.