TEACHING PROFESSIONAL ETHICS IN CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT AND PROPERTY

Ethics is a significant element of any professional practice, and is of particular relevance to the construction and property industries where professional judgement and advice is such a core activity. Recent consideration of professional ethics as a generic issue has moved attention from compliance to governance. In other words, the idea that practitioners simply comply with a particular set of ethical codes has been superseded with the idea that practitioners need to engage with ethics as a constantly changing set of values that they individually need to govern. Certainly there is still a need for benchmarking professional practice against particular ethical codes, but the responsibility of the practitioner to appreciate and 'own' particular value systems is of growing importance. This paper will review these changing perspectives on professional ethics, and relate those changes to how professional ethics might be taught within an undergraduate construction management and property program.