How to get hired as an architect in 2026-27

What "architect" actually means inside a firm, and the seven places the work happens

Two things confuse people applying for this job. The first is that "architect" is a legally protected title in most states, so the majority of people doing architecture in a firm are not yet architects. The second is that the title ladder inside a firm has almost nothing to do with licensure. You can run a project as an unlicensed job captain and you can be licensed and still drawing details. Firms hire for what you can produce; boards hand out the title.

The usual ladder runs roughly: Designer I and II (production, modeling, drawing sheets, redline pickup), Job Captain (owns a drawing set and keeps it coordinated), Project Architect (owns the technical resolution of a building and usually the consultant coordination), Project Manager (owns scope, fee, schedule and the client), Associate and Senior Associate (firm titles, not legal ones), Principal. Design-focused firms sometimes run a parallel track: Designer, Senior Designer, Design Director. Many people end up doing both, and the split matters at interview, because a firm hiring a technical person and a candidate pitching themselves as a conceptual designer is a mutual waste of an afternoon.

One title caution that costs people real trouble. Most state statutes protect "architect" and its derivatives, and some boards have acted against unlicensed people using "architectural designer" as well; Texas is the one most often cited. Before you put a title on LinkedIn or a resume, read your own board's rule on title use. "Designer", "Job Captain" or "Architectural Staff" are safe nearly everywhere.

Where you do the work shapes your career more than which sector you land in, because employer type decides how broad your experience gets, how fast you touch construction, and whether you will finish AXP on schedule.

• Large multidisciplinary practices (Gensler, HKS, Perkins&Will, HOK, SOM, NBBJ, Corgan, Page, ZGF, CannonDesign, DLR Group, SmithGroup, Perkins Eastman, Populous, Stantec, HDR, LEO A DALY). Structured reviews, real mentorship, big projects, applicant tracking systems, and sector studios. The hidden risk for AXP is narrowness: a huge project can keep you in one phase for two years, which starves your Construction and Evaluation hours. Ask directly in the interview how staff rotate through phases.
• Mid-size regional firms, roughly 20 to 150 people. Where a very large share of licensed architects actually work, and usually the best balance for getting licensed: projects small enough that you see them from programming through punch list, and big enough to be real buildings.
• Small studios and sole practitioners. Most architecture firms in the US have fewer than ten people. Hiring here is informal and almost never goes through a job board: a referral, or a well-aimed email with a portfolio attached. You will do everything, including the things nobody trained you for, which is excellent for licensure and hard on your weekends.
• Design-led boutiques. Highly competitive, often lower paid, strong portfolio culture, and a reputation that travels. Be honest with yourself about whether you want the work or the association.
• In-house at an owner or developer: a healthcare system, a university, a hotel or restaurant brand, a national retailer, an industrial or data center operator, a multifamily developer. You manage outside architects, maintain standards and prototypes, and sit on the client side of the table. Pay is often better and the hours are usually saner. Licensure still matters and AXP is harder to complete here, so do it first.
• Government and institutional: GSA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the military design agencies, state facilities departments, school districts, campus architect's offices, and municipal plan review and building departments. Published salary schedules, pensions, slow hiring, and the federal route is the GS-0808 Architect series on USAJOBS.
• Adjacent roles that take an architecture background and pay well: facade and envelope consulting, code and life-safety consulting, specifications writing, BIM and computational design roles, design-build contractors, owner's representatives, and AEC software companies. These are real careers, not consolation prizes, but most of them do not generate the AXP hours you need, so sequence them after licensure if the license matters to you.

Where architecture work actually is in 2026-27

Architecture employment follows construction financing, and in 2026-27 the funding sources are behaving very differently from one another. Knowing which is which tells you where to aim a cold email and which postings will still be open in three months.

Data centers and mission critical is the clearest growth employer in the profession, and it is private capital moving fast. The work is shell and core with brutal MEP coordination, a security and NDA regime, repeatable prototypes rolled out across sites, and schedules measured against a utility interconnection date rather than a planning commission agenda. Be honest about what it is: the architecture is rarely the point, and the day is coordination, documentation and speed. It is also, for a young person, among the best documentation training available anywhere, and the firms are hiring when others are not.

Healthcare is the steadiest sector in the field, for structural reasons: an aging population, systems with capital plans that run on their own cycle, and heavy regulation that makes experience non-transferable and therefore valuable. Expect the FGI Guidelines, state health department review, and in California the HCAI review process. Healthcare experience compounds: three years in it makes you hard to replace and somewhat hard to leave.

K-12 and higher education run on bonds and referendums, which means they track local ballots rather than interest rates, and they stay busy when the private market does not. Deferred maintenance, science and engineering buildings, student housing, athletics, and career and technical education facilities. Firms with a public-sector practice are the ones least exposed to a credit cycle.

Advanced manufacturing and industrial is concentrated and large: semiconductor fabrication, battery and EV plants, pharmaceutical and food processing, and the warehouse and logistics work that never fully stopped. These jobs are regional. If a fab or a battery plant is being built within sixty miles of you, there is architecture hiring attached to it, and it is worth searching by the project name as well as by firm.

Science and technology, meaning lab and life sciences buildings, is the sector most likely to be described wrongly to you. It boomed hard in 2021 and 2022, overbuilt in several metros, and cooled. Treat any lab-market summary written before 2025 as out of date and check current vacancy in the specific metro before you build a job search around it.

Multifamily and housing is the most interest-rate-sensitive corner and the one where policy is actively creating work. Upzoning, ADU legalization, conversion incentives, and the move in a growing number of jurisdictions to permit single-exit stair multifamily above the historical height limit all generate real projects. Do not quote an adoption date you have not verified: these are local code amendments, they land at different times in different places, and the only authority is the code actually adopted where the building sits.

Commercial office is weak, and the honest advice is not to aim a job search at it as a sector. What is live inside it is repositioning, amenity work, and office-to-residential conversion, and conversion feasibility has become a genuine specialty: floor plate depth, distance from window line to core, existing egress and stair pressurization, structural capacity for new plumbing risers, and whether the zoning permits residential at all. An architect who can run a conversion feasibility study in a week is employable in a soft office market.

Adaptive reuse and historic preservation is durable and counter-cyclical, often financed by federal and state historic tax credits, which means the Secretary of the Interior's Standards govern what you can do. It is also some of the most technically interesting work in the profession.

One market-reading habit worth building now. The AIA/Deltek Architecture Billings Index is published monthly and AIA describes it as a leading indicator of construction activity roughly nine to twelve months out, which makes it a usable proxy for architecture staffing. The AIA Consensus Construction Forecast covers sector spending. Read the current month yourself. The index has spent long stretches below the 50 breakeven line in recent years, and that, not automation, is the main reason an architecture job search in 2026-27 can feel slow.

The license: NAAB degree, NCARB Record, AXP hours, and the six ARE divisions

Treat licensure as a decade-long project you start managing in your second year of school, not a thing you deal with later. The people who get licensed early almost always did three unremarkable things: opened an NCARB Record as students, logged hours every month, and started testing before AXP was finished.

The degree. The clean path is a professional degree accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board: a five-year Bachelor of Architecture, a Master of Architecture (two to three and a half years depending on whether you hold a pre-professional degree), or a Doctor of Architecture. A four-year pre-professional degree in architectural studies is not a professional degree on its own. Check your specific program on NAAB's own list, because accreditation is granted to the program, not to the school. A foreign degree needs an NCARB Education Evaluation Services review, which takes time and sometimes additional coursework.

The experience-based alternative. A minority of states let you reach licensure without an accredited degree, through a longer documented experience route. These routes are real and people complete them, but they take longer, they can constrain reciprocity later because the NCARB Certificate normally expects an accredited degree, and the rule is entirely state-specific. NCARB publishes current requirements by jurisdiction and your board publishes the regulation that actually binds you. Read both, not a forum post and not a list in an article.

The NCARB Record. This is the account that holds everything: your education evaluation, your AXP hours, your exam results, and eventually your Certificate for reciprocity. Open it in school. NCARB has offered a reduced rate for students and recent graduates, and the Record carries an annual fee thereafter.

AXP. 3,740 hours across six experience areas, reported through your Record and verified by a supervisor, who is normally a licensed architect. The split is Practice Management 160, Project Management 360, Programming and Analysis 260, Project Planning and Design 1,080, Project Development and Documentation 1,520, Construction and Evaluation 360. Two things trip people up. First, the reporting deadline: hours reported close to when you earned them get full credit, later ones get less, and past a cutoff they do not count, so set a monthly calendar reminder and treat it as payroll, not paperwork. Second, the distribution: Construction and Evaluation is the category people finish last, because junior staff are kept on documentation. If your firm does not send you to site, say so to your supervisor early and ask for site visits, submittal review and punch list work by name. There is also an AXP Portfolio route for qualifying experience gained outside direct supervision, which is how some people count work at a contractor or an owner.

The ARE. Six divisions, taken in any order, year-round at Prometric. Practice Management covers firm operations, contracts and risk. Project Management covers the project team, the owner-architect agreement, quality control and scheduling. Programming and Analysis covers site, zoning, program and code analysis. Project Planning and Design covers schematic design and the integration of structure, envelope and building systems. Project Development and Documentation covers materials, assemblies, detailing, construction documents and specifications. Construction and Evaluation covers bidding, contract administration, submittals, payment and post-occupancy. PPD and PDD are the long ones and the ones people fail; many candidates take them close together so the overlapping material is loaded once. Each division mixes multiple choice with case studies that give you reference documents on screen, so practice navigating a code excerpt and an AIA contract under time pressure, not just recalling facts.

The mechanics worth knowing before you register. In most states you can now start testing before you finish AXP, and doing so is the biggest lever you control, because exam content is closest to hand in the years right after school. A failed division means a sixty day wait before retaking it and a cap on attempts within a rolling twelve months. Passed divisions sit under a rolling clock, five years in most states, which some boards extend. NCARB publishes current fees per division, pass rates by division, and the retake and clock rules, and it has said a next version of the exam is in development, so read its site before you commit money to a study package.

What the license actually buys you. The legal authority to seal drawings and be in responsible control of the work. The ability to be named architect of record, which is how a firm holds a contract. Promotion past a ceiling in most firms and most public agencies. The ability to practice for yourself. And the NCARB Certificate, which is the mechanism that turns licensure in one state into reciprocal licensure in others with far less friction than applying from scratch each time.

Outside the United States, briefly, because these systems are not interchangeable. In the UK, registration is with the Architects Registration Board, historically reached through RIBA Parts 1, 2 and 3: a three-year degree, a year in practice, a two-year Part 2, a further year of practice and the Part 3 exam, which comes to roughly seven years. ARB has been reforming its criteria and the route is changing, so read the current requirement on arb.org.uk rather than an older description. In Canada it is a CACB-accredited degree, the Internship in Architecture Program, the ExAC exam and registration with a provincial association. In Australia it is an accredited degree plus the Architectural Practice Examination administered under AACA, with registration by a state or territory board; New Zealand is separate and runs through the New Zealand Registered Architects Board. Mutual recognition arrangements between regulators exist, including one between NCARB and ARB, and their eligibility terms change, so check the current agreement on the regulators' own sites rather than relying on a summary.

How firms actually hire, and the channels that work

Architecture hiring is portfolio-first in a way few other professions are. The resume gets read second. A principal opens your PDF, scrolls, and makes a provisional decision in a couple of minutes, which is why the order of your pages matters more than almost anything else in your application.

The typical sequence at a mid-size or large firm. A portfolio and resume screen. A 20 to 30 minute call with a studio leader or HR covering why this firm, what you have worked on, availability, work authorization and salary expectation. Then the portfolio presentation: 15 to 20 minutes of you talking through two or three projects to a group of two to five people, almost always including the project architect you would work under, with interruptions. Sometimes a short exercise. Then references and an offer. Two to six weeks end to end, longer if the firm is waiting on a contract to be signed, which is common and worth asking about directly.

At a small firm, all of that collapses into a conversation and a walk around the office, and the decision can come the same week. At a public agency it expands into a formal application scored against a published class specification, where omitting a date or a transcript eliminates you before an architect sees your name, and the timeline runs one to six months.

The single most underrated channel in this profession is the direct approach. Most US architecture firms are small and most of them never post a job anywhere. A short, specific email to a named principal with a PDF under 10MB attached, referencing a particular project of theirs and saying what you would contribute, works here in a way it does not work in software or finance. Send twenty of those to firms whose work you can actually discuss and you will out-perform two hundred applications into an applicant tracking system.

A note on the portfolio PDF itself, because this is where applications die silently. Keep it under 10MB; plenty of firm mail servers reject larger attachments and nobody writes back to tell you. Name the file with your own name. Make the text selectable rather than flattened to images, because large firms run it through an applicant tracking system. Put a link to a longer or higher-resolution version at the top of the resume for people who want more.

If you are an international graduate, handle work authorization early, because it decides which firms can even consider you. Small firms often will not sponsor; large multidisciplinary practices and the big healthcare, aviation and mission critical employers routinely do, and that alone should shape your target list. Some architecture programs carry a CIP code on the US Department of Homeland Security STEM designated degree program list, which is what determines eligibility for the longer STEM OPT extension. Find the CIP code printed on your I-20, check it against the current DHS list yourself, and ask your school's international office to confirm, because the list is amended and your eligibility follows the code on your document, not the name of your degree. Federal and most defense-adjacent work requires US citizenship, so do not spend applications there.

• Firm websites, directly. The largest single channel. Build a target list of 30 to 60 firms in your metro by sector, check their careers pages monthly, and email the ones with no posting anyway.
• AIA local chapter job boards. Many chapters run one and many regional firms post there and nowhere else. Find your chapter and check it weekly.
• Archinect Jobs, and Dezeen Jobs or Architizer for design-led practices. Archinect is still the field's default board and skews toward firms that actually want architecture staff.
• School career services and alumni networks, which carry far more weight in architecture than in most fields because studio critics and visiting professors are practicing architects with hiring authority.
• LinkedIn for large and mid-size firms, which is where their recruiters work, and where sector studio leaders are findable by name.
• USAJOBS, series 0808 (Architect), for GSA, VA, the Army Corps of Engineers, NAVFAC and the Air Force. Read the "How to Apply" section as literal instructions, because it is scored as instructions.
• State, county, city and university HR portals, often on NEOGOV, for campus architect's offices, school districts, facilities departments and plan review positions. Search by class title (Architect I/II/III, Facilities Architect, Project Manager) rather than by the generic term.
• Contractor and owner career pages for design-build, preconstruction and in-house roles, which rarely appear on architecture-specific boards and which many architecture graduates never think to search.
• Architecture-specific staffing and contract placement, which firms lean on when backlog is uncertain. A contract role is a legitimate way in and the hours still count toward AXP, but ask up front who verifies them and whether the placement converts.

The portfolio, now that rendering and massing are automated

This is the part of the job search that changed most between 2021 and 2026, and almost nobody has updated their advice. A photoreal exterior render used to cost two days of a junior's time or a few thousand dollars outsourced. In 2026 it costs minutes. Early massing and yield studies that took a week take an afternoon. The direct consequence for you is simple and slightly brutal: beautiful images no longer distinguish your portfolio, because every portfolio in the stack has them, and the reviewer knows roughly what they cost to make.

What did not get cheap is the evidence that you can make a building stand up, keep water out, pass a code review, and be built from your drawings by someone who has never met you. That evidence is drawings: plans at a readable scale, sections, wall sections, details, and a drawing set that coordinates. A portfolio in 2026-27 should be weighted toward that and should contain a small number of images chosen deliberately, not a gallery.

Keep it to three to five projects. More than that and the reviewer skims, which means your best project gets the same three seconds as your worst. Lead with the strongest project and assume the reader may stop after it. Give each project one page of context, meaning site, program, constraint and the problem you were solving, and then give the drawings the rest of the room.

Put an attribution line on every single project, in the same place every time: the firm or studio, the phase, the team size, and exactly what you did. Something like: "Four-story office building, DD through CD, team of six. I produced the enclosure details and the stair and elevator core sheets, and ran the submittal log during CA." This is the most checkable claim in your portfolio and the most commonly fudged one, and interviewers probe it specifically. A candidate who is precise about doing one sheet well reads better than one who is vague about having designed a tower.

For students and recent graduates, the single highest-return move is to take at least one studio project past the studio deliverable: draw the wall assembly, resolve the stair, do the egress diagram, pick real products. A comprehensive or technical studio project belongs in the portfolio even if it is uglier than your conceptual work. Firms hire graduates for production, and a plan with dimensions, a section with a datum and a detail at a real scale say more about whether you can be useful in month two than any rendering will.

For experienced hires, the portfolio should look different from a student's and usually does not. Include an excerpt from a real drawing set, with your sheets named. Include a construction administration artifact: a marked-up shop drawing, an RFI sketch you drew in response to a field condition, a site photo next to the detail it was built from. Include something that got built, and if the built thing differs from the rendering, show both and explain the change. That comparison is the most persuasive page an experienced candidate can have, because it proves you have been through the part of the process where decisions get expensive.

Handle confidentiality properly, because it is noticed. Do not publish a client's unbuilt data center or an unannounced hospital expansion. Use a password-protected link, redact the client and site, or show details rather than the project. Saying "this project is under NDA, so I am showing the assembly and not the plan" reads as professional and distinguishes you from the candidate who clearly does not know they have an obligation.

Hand drawing has quietly become a differentiator, for the same reason rendering stopped being one. A page of real process sketches, or the ability to sketch a section on a whiteboard when asked, is now a scarce signal precisely because it cannot be produced by a laptop in the room. It does not need to be beautiful. It needs to show that you think in sections.

• Must appear somewhere in the portfolio: a dimensioned floor plan at a stated scale, a building section, at least one wall section or enclosure detail at a real scale (1 1/2" = 1'-0" or 3" = 1'-0"), a stair or an envelope assembly resolved, and a code or zoning diagram showing you understand what the rules did to the design.
• Should appear if you have it: a drawing set excerpt with your sheets, a built photograph, a detail compared with how it was actually built, a redline you resolved, a materials or assembly study with real products named.
• One or two renderings, not fifteen, each doing a job the drawings cannot. State what the image is showing and why it is there.
• Specifics on every page: square footage, construction type and occupancy classification, structural system, cladding system, budget if it is public, jurisdiction if the approvals were hard.
• Leave out: GPA, a long designer statement, lorem-style conceptual text, skill percentage bars, the parametric facade study with no building behind it, and any project where you cannot answer "what did you personally draw here".
• File hygiene: under 10MB, consistent page size, selectable text, legible at 100 percent on a laptop screen, named YourName_Portfolio_2026.pdf, plus a 1 to 2 page sample you can paste under a resume.

The resume: one page, and what a hiring architect actually reads

Keep it to one page until roughly ten years in. Architecture resumes get read alongside a portfolio, so the resume's job is narrow: establish credential status, project types, phases, software and jurisdictions fast enough that the reviewer can decide which pile you go in.

The top block does the heavy lifting and most candidates waste it. Name, city, phone, email, portfolio link. Then, if you have them: NCARB Record number, AXP hours complete (or "AXP complete"), ARE divisions passed listed by name, and license and state if you are licensed. Firms screen for exactly those strings, and a candidate with four divisions passed is materially more attractive than one with none, because they are closer to being able to seal work. Burying that at the bottom under "Certifications" costs you.

Experience bullets should be concrete and phase-aware. For each project: name or type, size in square feet, construction cost if it is public information, the phases you worked (SD, DD, CD, CA, or by name if the firm used different ones), what you personally produced, the software you produced it in, and the jurisdiction if the permitting was non-trivial. "Produced enclosure and stair details for a 240,000 sf acute care bed tower in Revit, DD through CD, including HCAI submittal coordination" tells a hiring architect everything. "Collaborated on healthcare projects" tells them nothing and reads as someone hiding thin experience.

List software honestly and in order of real fluency. Revit first if that is true, because Revit is the production environment at the overwhelming majority of US firms and a candidate who is genuinely fast in it is immediately useful. Then Rhino, Grasshopper, AutoCAD, Enscape or Twinmotion or V-Ray, the Adobe suite, Bluebeam Revu, Navisworks, SketchUp, and any project or deliverable management system you have actually used, such as Newforma, Deltek or Procore. Do not list a tool you cannot open in front of someone, because the sketch exercise sometimes happens in it.

If you are early, put construction and fabrication experience in rather than hiding it. Framing houses, working in a shop, a summer on a site, a contractor internship: architects value this unusually highly, because the profession's quiet complaint about recent graduates is that they do not know how anything is built. The same goes for fabrication coursework, a digital fab lab, or a design-build program.

What gets skipped by nearly every reader: GPA, a career objective, "passionate about sustainable design", skill rating bars, a studio project title with no explanation, high school anything, and the second page. The exception is a licensed candidate with a long project list, where a second page is earned and expected.

The interview: the wall section, the redline, and the honesty question

The portfolio presentation is the interview, and the format catches people off guard: you talk for 15 to 20 minutes while a group interrupts you. They are testing three things. Can you explain a decision as a decision, with the alternative you rejected and why. Is the work actually yours. And would a client sit in a room with you for an hour.

Practice out loud, timed, in front of someone who will interrupt. The most common failure is not nervousness, it is narration: walking through images in order, describing what the reviewer can already see, and never stating a problem and a resolution. Start each project with the constraint. "The site had a 35 foot height limit and the program needed four floors of lab, so the mechanical had to go somewhere other than the roof" earns more attention in one sentence than three minutes of concept language.

Expect the technical question, in some form, on whatever you show. "Walk me through how this wall is built, outside to inside." "Where does the water go." "What is the rated assembly at this corridor." "How does this stair meet egress width." "What is the structure doing where you cantilevered this." If you show it, you own it, which is a good reason not to put a project in your portfolio you cannot discuss at that resolution. A graduate is not expected to answer perfectly. A graduate is expected to have thought about it and to say what they do not know rather than invent a plausible answer, which experienced architects spot instantly.

Expect a question about something that went wrong. "What did you get wrong on this project and what changed." This is not a trap. It is a test of whether you have been through enough of a project to have been corrected, and whether you can take a redline without defending yourself. The best answer names a specific error, what it would have cost, who caught it and what you changed in your own process afterwards.

The exercise, where there is one, is usually short: sketch a stair that works, resolve a parapet or a corner condition, mark up a drawing and find the problems, or run a quick zoning yield study on a site. Forty-five minutes to an hour, often by hand, sometimes in Revit. It is fair and it is informative. A multi-day unpaid design test on what looks like live project work is a different thing, and declining it, or asking that it be paid, is reasonable and does not usually cost you a job worth having.

Ask real questions, because in this field they are also a screen. What phase are the projects I would join. Who reviews my work and how often. How does the firm support licensure: are ARE fees reimbursed, is there study time, is there a raise or bonus at licensure. What is the utilization target. How do staff get Construction and Evaluation hours. How is the backlog right now, and is this role tied to a contract that is signed. That last one is the single most useful question in an architecture interview in 2026-27, and firms that answer it straight are the ones worth joining.

Assume a backchannel reference. Architecture is a small profession in any given city, and principals call people they know at your previous firm whether or not you listed them. This cuts both ways: it is a reason to leave well, and it is the reason a good relationship with one project architect can carry you through three jobs.

Pay, and what the first five years are actually accumulating

Read the real sources and ignore the aggregators, which in this field are unusually wrong because they blend licensed principals with first-year designers. Start with BLS OES code 17-1011, architects except landscape and naval, which gives you a national and metro median plus the 10th to 90th percentile spread, and the metro variation is large enough that the national number is nearly useless on its own. Then read the AIA Compensation Report and your local AIA chapter's salary survey, which are what firms themselves benchmark against. In pay-transparency states the posted ranges are a direct read on the market. For federal roles the GS-0808 pay tables are public, including locality adjustments.

The honest framing, because you will find it out eventually and it is better to know now: architecture pays less than engineering for an education that is usually longer, and substantially less than software or finance. The compensating facts are real too, and worth weighing deliberately rather than romantically: the work is tangible and public, the career is long and does not usually have an age cliff, licensure gives you an exit into independent practice, and the owner-side and consultant roles that open after licensure often pay better than the firm you left.

There are specific moments where pay actually moves. The second job, which is where most of the correction to an undermarket starting salary happens. Licensure, where many firms pay a bonus or a step increase, and it is reasonable to ask for that in writing at offer stage. A sector specialty that is in demand, meaning healthcare, data centers, labs or aviation. And demonstrated construction administration experience, which firms are genuinely short of because so many juniors never get it.

What you are accumulating in the first five years is less about money and more about three things. Hours, in all six AXP categories, which only happens if you watch the distribution rather than the total. A set of drawings you can discuss in technical detail, which is your portable asset. And the experience of a project going into construction, because the gap between people who have watched a building get built from their drawings and people who have not is visible in five minutes of conversation.

Two pieces of housekeeping that people regret skipping. Keep a running experience log from your first week: dates, project name and type, construction value, your specific role, phases, and your supervising architect with their license number. You will need exactly this for AXP verification and again for your board application, and by then your supervisor will have changed firms twice. And ask, before you leave any firm, whether you may keep a portfolio excerpt of your own work and what they want redacted. Get it in writing. You cannot retrieve your sheets after your email is shut off, and a career's worth of portfolio has been lost that way.

What a screen is looking for

These are the terms that a resume screen, human or automated, is matching against for this role. Use the ones that are true of you, in the words the posting uses.

• Architecture
• Licensed Architect
• Architectural Designer
• Project Architect
• Job Captain
• NCARB Record
• Architectural Experience Program (AXP)
• Architect Registration Examination (ARE 5.0)
• NAAB-accredited degree
• Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch)
• Master of Architecture (M.Arch)
• NCARB Certificate
• Reciprocity
• Responsible control
• Architect of record
• Autodesk Revit
• BIM
• Autodesk Construction Cloud
• Rhinoceros 3D
• Grasshopper
• Rhino.Inside.Revit
• Dynamo
• pyRevit
• Autodesk Forma
• TestFit
• AutoCAD
• SketchUp
• Enscape
• Twinmotion
• V-Ray
• Lumion
• D5 Render
• Adobe Creative Suite
• InDesign
• Bluebeam Revu
• Navisworks
• Solibri
• Speckle
• Newforma
• Procore
• Deltek Vantagepoint
• Schematic design (SD)
• Design development (DD)
• Construction documents (CD)
• Construction administration (CA)
• Programming
• Site analysis
• Zoning analysis
• Code analysis
• International Building Code (IBC)
• Life safety plan
• Egress analysis
• Occupancy classification
• Construction type
• Accessibility / ADA Standards
• ANSI A117.1
• NFPA 101
• Energy code compliance
• ASHRAE 90.1
• Title 24
• LEED AP
• WELL AP
• Passive House
• Embodied carbon
• AIA 2030 Commitment
• Wall section
• Enclosure detailing
• Building envelope
• Air and water barrier
• Thermal bridging
• Curtain wall
• Rainscreen
• Roof assembly
• Stair and elevator core
• Fire-rated assembly
• UL assembly
• Specifications
• MasterFormat
• Division 08 openings
• Submittal review
• RFI
• Shop drawing review
• Punch list
• Substantial completion
• Change order
• AIA B101
• AIA A201
• Owner-architect agreement
• Consultant coordination
• Clash detection
• Drawing set coordination
• Quality control review
• Permit set
• Plan check response
• Entitlements
• Design review board
• Historic tax credit
• Secretary of the Interior's Standards
• Adaptive reuse
• Office-to-residential conversion
• Healthcare architecture
• FGI Guidelines
• HCAI (formerly OSHPD)
• Data center / mission critical
• K-12 and higher education
• Multifamily housing
• Laboratory planning
• Tenant improvement
• Feasibility study
• Yield study
• Space programming
• Design-build
• Portfolio
• GS-0808 Architect series

Mistakes that cost people this job

Questions people ask