This was an exciting week for me personally. As President of the Western NY Chapter of the International Facility Management Association I was honored to be asked to be a member of the Advisory Board for the Master of Science in Facility Management Graduate program at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY. This on-line course prepares an individual with the knowledge base to be an effective facility manager in any business or organization.
My entry into facility management was as an engineering technician in an engineering group responsible for providing test equipment and maintaining the facility for a large Division within the big yellow box company here in Rochester, NY. There wasn’t formal training for facility managers in 1979 so you grew in the position through day-to-day experience, you learned by doing. In fact there was not any discipline called Facilities Management. Probably the closest I got to that was through working with the IE’s assigned to work with our group. Over time I gained the skills and developed resources needed to manage facilities projects daily and to develop timely solutions outcomes that satisfied our internal customers. It wasn’t until the mid-1980’s facility management became a career path. With the RIT MS graduate program a full-time student can learn in 20 months or 2 years part-time what I learned over nearly 15 years as a full-time facility manager. True, you never stop learning and after leaving the big box in 1991, those skills learned never go away. Today, I’m still involved with many of the facets of facility management particularly the unique service of building asset databases for facility managers and maintenance mangers who are truly interested in reducing costs using the technologies available to track equipment and costs.
Take a moment and review the program content available in the on-line program. See if it’s for you. Do in 20-24 months what took me the nearly 15 years to learn and many learn better.

http://www.rit.edu/programs/program_detail.php?id=410