The 5 Reasons AXP is Failing Architect Candidates - No 3

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.

Reason Number 3 that the AXP is failing architect licensure candidates is a tough one,

people lie.

That's right. People are putting on their reports experience that they didn't actually have, and they're putting it there intentionally.

There are sometimes people recording hours in the wrong area unintentionally. That's just not knowing, and I talked about that last time, is because the categories are so broad, so general, that they don't know where to put it.

But this is an intentional lie, and it's corroborated by supervisors, because supervisors have to sign off on those reports. There are two kinds of supervisors who corroborate the lying.

1. One is the supervisor who doesn't care, not paying attention. Some of them, they're just not engaged. They're not engaged in the process of helping the candidate record the proper hours. It's just a task that they have to do. They're assigned, but they're not taking responsibility for that assignment as a supervisor, and they're just signing off on whatever those hours are.

2. The other kind is a little more malicious in that they encourage the white lie. They encourage the candidate to put hours in the experience area that they don't have, they didn't get, to help them fill out their hours.

Neither are helping them.

Anytime a candidate records hours for experience they didn't get, what is that really doing? They don't have that experience, so they're not going to build that competency.

The fact that either they don't care or they're encouraging the lack of experience and recording it as experience is a problem with the system, because there's nothing to check that beyond the supervisor.

The supervisor has the responsibility to make sure that experience that the candidate is getting matches the tasks that they actually do and take responsibility for that--be accountable.

The candidate needs to be accountable in recording the hours. The supervisor needs to be accountable in making sure that those are real hours. Often that doesn't happen.