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This research first contextualises curriculum development in higher education institutions (HEIs) before focusing specifically on construction management programmes in order to engender wider polemic discourse and new insights into current provisions. The overarching epistemology adopts both interpretivist and pragmatist philosophical stances, couched within inductive reasoning, to critically analyse extant literature as a secondary data source, with each publication representing a unit of analysis. Thematic groupings of research activity are then clustered and interconnections between researchers and research themes are identified using bibliometrics. The findings illustrate that while curriculum development in HEIs has received increasing scrutiny and attention, there is a notable lack of connectivity among the studies conducted. This lack of a cohesive body of knowledge is exacerbated by the prevailing academic notion of ‘individualism and self’ vis-a-vis the ‘collective team’. This leads to an emergent working hypothesis, namely, that bespoke curriculum development occurs within an ‘every person for themselves’ mentality. Cumulatively, these issues reported upon serve to illustrate a fundamental absence of a clear agenda for curriculum development in construction management programmes. In turn, this finding underscores the urgent need for a more prominent collaborative and global community of practice to optimise future educational provisions.

Today’s work environment, regardless of career, is experiencing an unprecedented number of generations working together. Specific to the construction management industry, in order to effectively manage a team in such a generationally diverse workforce, a construction manager needs to increase their awareness and empathy of the varying modes of communication. Working in teams, 29 undergraduate construction management students completed a quantity take-off estimating project where a series of communication constraints were implemented (simulation) within each team that mirrored the ‘preferred available mode of communication’ of different workplace generations. Likert scale questionnaires were administered throughout the course to collect data to determine if a student’s awareness and empathy of generational communication changed through the simulation experience. The results from the simulation indicate promotion in workplace generational communication awareness and the role of empathy within the construction industry. However, these promotions do not appear to have a statistically significant correlation with each simulation. Furthermore, while students generally favour their own generational ‘preferred available mode of communication,’ they overwhelmingly rate face-to-face communication as the most effective communication style in the construction management industry.