architect54

A lot of you out there are concerned with life, LEED or being laid off. Right now, licensure is just as important. This is a reminder to start a council record today or tomorrow to avoid the 6-month rule. If you have a council record number before July 1st, 2009, you’ll have a year to submit prior work experience that exceeds 6 months. I described this in a previous post. Some of you are sleeping on this important change in Intern Development Program rules by the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB). Pay attention and determine if you need to set up a record to save past experience.

I came across these slides over the weekend, A Path to Licensure and Owing Your Own Firm. The most important slide to me is #11, which recommends involvement in IDP before graduating. Whether you intend to start a firm or not, licensure is important to your career and starting early helps.

Failing Building Design and Construction Systems forces me to realize I have more than 4 years to complete this exam. Relax. You’ve got plenty of time.

When I started I set a one year goal to pass the entire exam. I did this to speed up the process and motivate myself. But inbetween I didn’t study well for the two exams I failed.

So as a caution to others, remember you have 5 years from the date of your first passed exam. That’s plenty of time to study for 7 exams. Sometimes you can slip up and bam, you missed your chance to reschedule. On Schematic Design, I fell asleep the night I was supposed to reschedule. Don’t hesitate to reschedule an exam, and reschedule early. Don’t wait for the 3 business day deadline set by Prometric.

Schedule exams when you’re fully prepared and ready. That way if you fail, you won’t over study the same content again and you can strategize and prepare differently.

At the AIANY’s Got License disscussion, NCARB’s Nick Serfass gave some pointers for using the new online employment verification tool, e-EVR.

Nick discussed submiting your IDP units to your supervisor for approval. He explained, if your supervisor disagrees with your submission he/she has 3 options. The first option, I didn’t quite hear in the discussion. The other two were “Return for edits” and ”Reject permanently”. The return for edits means your supervisor disagrees with certain categories and requests it is edited before approval. The reject permanently means your supervisor does not intend to ever approve those units and time period. Nick made it clear that before the final click to reject, your supervisor recieves 2 or 3 warnings to click through. It is likely they would pick up on these, before making the final click to reject. Nick also made it clear to give NCARB a call so they can adjust the e-EVR, if for some reason your supervisor made a mistake to reject permanently.

Those of you using e-EVR know of the status bar that shows how many units are completed. Nick explained that your supervisor sees a similiar bar denoting your progress. As I understood, the supervisor’s bar does not state exactly the same info as the one you see. Meant as an easy visual aid, the bar tracks your progress and lets your supervisor assess how close you are to the IDP goal of 700 training units.

Update: For those not familiar with e-EVR @mfrech’s blog has a screenshot here of e-EVR.