Facilities @ Management

2.17 Academic Career Paths in Real Estate and Facility Management – a Personal Experience Report

Antje Junghans

“The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths to it are not found but made. The making of those pathways changes both the maker and the destination.” Australian Commission for the Future (Jopling, John 1999).

With great pleasure I accepted the invitation by Edmond Rondeau to contribute to the concept of this new Facility Management (FM) book, which he described as follows. “Our concept envisioned not another textbook, but a gathering and displaying of the reasons, the motivation, the impressions, and the experience provided by eyewitnesses, and participants of the birth and growth of this phenomenal FM concept, which found its way into associations, academia, and corporations worldwide in these four decades” (Edmond Rondeau, January 2023).

I am looking forward to sharing my personal academic career path toward Facility Management (FM) since its beginnings in Germany in the early 1990s. In my studies, working life as well as in tertiary education and science, I have been involved in the fields of architecture, construction, real estate, and facility management since 1985. Initially, the later career path was still open. I received inspiration for the academic direction during my studies, which awakened my curiosity and enthusiasm for scientific work. Working as a professor became both a profession and a vocation. My ambition is to ...