Measure of Competency - Are We Making Progress?

I talk about NCARB’s Competency Standard and the AXP, the Architectural Experience Program, because for new architectural professionals who want to become licensed architects, this is what you do.

This is AXP in your life, because everything that you do now, from the time that you got that job to the time you get licensed, everything is tracked, everything is logged, all the hours that you spend and all the exams that you take.

Everything is tracked by NCARB in their data, and they keep track of a lot. If you go to NCARB website and up in the upper right hand corner, you'll see a link for data and resources in there, they have a bunch of resources, but look for NCARB By The Numbers.

Let's spend just a couple of minutes here this morning talking about the numbers. Why is this important? Looking at numbers historically that are tracked helps us see if are we making any progress. Are we actually getting better at doing what we're doing? Are we getting worse? Are we just kind of floating, doing the same thing every year?

NCARB has numbers currently posted from 2012 but that goes even farther back. They've got numbers back to 1976 now, back in 2012 they didn't have AXP. They called it IDP. So that gradually transformed into the AXP. It was all about documenting your experience, though.

But when you look back right now, the time it takes to go from getting that first job to being licensed, essentially graduation to being licensed is a long process. It's like over seven years because of the time it takes to get the experience and the time it takes take the exams.

Now it's gradually increased, because back in 2013 it was about five and a half years. And through 2016 & 2017 it was below five years. It was about four and a half years, 4.2 years. But for some reason now we're back up into the seven year range.

We're not getting better. We're getting worse now.

COVID didn't help. During COVID everything took a dip. Fewer people tested, fewer people had jobs, so they weren't logging hours.

But were recovering now, and it's been a few years, a couple of years, that we should be seeing a real increase in the number of people taking exams, the number of people logging hours. We should see a lowering of the time it takes to get the experience.

You need to be a licensed architect. There’s a system for logging hours, but there's no system for really making it better. That's what I'm doing. I'm trying to focus on how can we get better at this, how can we do this faster, more efficiently. Always be focused on getting better. And the only way you can get better is by taking action to get that way.

Nothing ever happens without taking action.