Video: Highlights from the AIA Emerging Professionals Summit: Engaging and Empowering the Next Generation

by Lian Chang, Director of Research and Information

What if architecture students received a license to practice upon graduation? What if real estate development, public policy, and user interface design attracted more professionals with an architectural background? What if we stopped calling our graduates “interns,” and let them be known simply as “architects?”

These were some of the ideas that came out of the 2014 Emerging Professionals Summit, hosted by the AIA January 24–26 in Albuquerque. More than 70 architects, emerging professionals, architecture students, and leaders from AIA, ACSA, AIAS, NCARB, and NAAB convened to imagine the future of  licensure, firm practice and culture, education, and career development.

I attended the summit as part of an ACSA delegation that also included President Norman Millar and Executive Director Michael Monti. We contributed to three of the four working groups—Licensure, Career Advancement, and Education—by sharing the perspectives of accredited schools of architecture and the work that they undertake to support emerging professionals.

AIA leadership, including 2014 AIA President Helene Combs Dreiling, FAIA, Chief Executive Officer Robert Ivy, FAIA, and 2013 President Mickey Jacob, FAIA, expressed a desire to strengthen the AIA’s future membership base by better engaging emerging professionals, while tying this goal to issues affecting the profession’s ability to address broader societal and environmental concerns.

Summit attendees alternated between intensive sessions in the four workgroups to identify opportunities and priorities, and larger group conversations that critiqued and contextualized workgroup findings. Identified goals included promoting project-based K-12 curricula focusing on the built environment; opening the AIA to anyone interested in joining an “American Institute of Architecture”; and expanding partnerships between industry and academia to lower financial barriers for students. Disagreements surfaced between firm leaders looking for architecture school graduates to be more “job ready” upon graduation and educators and those following “alternative” career paths championing more open-ended exploration. But there was also a shared understanding that this is cannot be an either/or situation. How can we be both specialists and generalists, focused and diverse, expanding into a “big tent” profession without losing professional identity? This question is an issue for the academy and the profession alike, as schools look to expand training in design thinking and entrepreneurship while preparing graduates for licensure and the design of buildings.

There will be more to come. Last week, AIA posted a video and article in AIArchitect, promising more discussion and follow through into demonstrable actions. While we shouldn’t expect an “American Institute of Architecture” rebranding for the AIA anytime soon, banishing the name “intern” in favor of a more elevating term (such as “architect,” distinguishable from “licensed architect”) seemed to receive unanimous support. NCARB representatives noted that this could not be mandated at a national level, but that changes to the NCARB Model Law could encourage states to reconsider their regulation of the title “architect.” It’s a symbolic and semantic change, but one that could catalyze broader shifts in how people think of the profession.

ACSA is currently pursuing consensus outcomes related to the summit. Our Annual Meeting, to be held April 10-12, 2014 in Miami Beach, will bring a report on efforts to clarify (not to reduce, but to communicate) the range of paths through architectural education. The goal is for the public, prospective students, and those within the field to more easily understand what it means to “go to architecture school.” We also have an architecture graduate survey in development that will help to better understand what architecture graduates are doing and how they are doing it. We intend for the survey’s outcomes to put more reliable and comprehensive data about emerging professionals on the table.

What do you think? What can architecture schools and the ACSA do to better prepare our students and emerging professionals for practice?