The 5 Reasons AXP is Failing Architect Candidates - No 2

The AXP is the Architectural Experience Program. This is NCARB’s system for helping you, the new design professional, document hours in areas that are important to gain competency in as an architect. As you work, you gain experience. And every hour of time that you work on a particular task that contributes to the competency of you as an architect, contributes to your experience you log that in a particular area.

I'm listing the top 5 reasons the AXP is failing architecture licensing candidate in that effort, and it's failing architecture firms too.

I don't mean to be negative about this. It's just pointing out some things that maybe it's The Elephant In The Room when it comes to recording experience.

This reason is related to how general it is, but has a little different nuance. The areas are too general, and so when a candidate does a task, they don't really understand the relationship between the task and the area.

Where does it go?

Is this Practice Management?

Is it Project Management?

Is it Documentation?

What they tend to do is they put it into an area that's familiar. Everything sort of becomes documentation, and they don't realize that there could actually be a nuance to that task that might suggest that's not documentation. It may seem like documentation, but it's really part of project management, and so they're not getting those hours in the right area because they don't really understand, because it's just too general.

What does that even mean? “Practice Management”, “Project Management”. To the candidate, it's not defined. This is really comes down to the mentors job of guiding the candidate. Not just mentor, but supervisor, because you may have a mentor who you meet with on a regular basis and discuss how things are going, but the supervisor who's actually assigning you the task, who's actually going to sign off on that report, needs to provide some more guidance. They need to actually say, “Okay, there's this task that you're going to do right now, and when you report it, it goes in this area because it supports this area of knowledge.”

Wouldn't it be even better, though, if those tasks were supporting the 16 competencies. And actually, when you combine the 16 competencies with all the bullet points, there's 70 different possibilities of how to apply the tasks that you do now.

NCARB identifies, 96 tasks in the AXP, but those tasks are really not comprehensive. There's a lot of other tasks that may come up. I’ve heard some say, “Well, you know, that task isn't even listed here. Where do I put it?” And that's the supervisor's job, and/or the mentor's job, to guide the candidate where to put that information.

The candidate may sell themselves short on the hours that they get, and may actually be applying hours in the wrong area, and ends up having to put in a lot more hours when they really didn't need to.

So that's the Number 2 reason AXP is failing architect candidates.

Start reviewing the 16 competencies and all those bullet points, the 70 total competencies that where you can log those tasks. Think about what you're doing right now, today, and go to those competencies, those bullet points, where does it fit, and start keeping track of that.

Ask me for a copy of my comparison of the 16 Competency Standard and the AXP Tasks. I’ll send it to you for free.

Yes, you still need to log the hours in the AXP areas, but you’ll have a better understanding of how they apply to your big goal of becoming an architect, by checking you tasks with the competencies.