by Vicky Boddie, Assoc. AIA, chair, NAC Survey Task Force, and
John Cary, Assoc. AIA, executive director, ArchVoices

After many months of collaboration and development, the AIA National Associates Committee (NAC) and ArchVoices announce the launch of the 2003 Internship & Career Survey. Between March 24 and April 7, this Web-based survey will be open by invitation to more than 23,000 young professionals. The survey represents an unmatched effort to document the recent history and present state of architecture internship and registration.

The NAC will release preliminary survey results during the AIA convention in San Diego via a May 10 interactive session, “Maintaining Momentum, Sharing Models, and Shaping the Future.” The session, like the survey, draws inspiration largely from the proceedings of the 2002 National Summit on Architectural Internship, held last October. Proceedings from the convention session and detailed findings of the report will be available online by mid-June. Survey results also will be published in a forthcoming, first-ever print publication on internship by ArchVoices, scheduled for release this fall.

Need for data
Some architects speculate that half of all architecture-school graduates never enter traditional practice. To date, no survey has ever confirmed this claim nor studied the variables directing career decisions of young professionals. The fact is, there are few empirical data available on the career pursuits and experiences of architecture-school graduates and professionals of any age. As a result, policy decisions such as those affecting internship and registration exams are made with little or no statistical basis. The 2003 Internship & Career Survey is one attempt to rectify this situation. Its purpose is to help all members of the profession make more informed decisions on issues affecting students and graduates.

Over the past 10 years, the collateral organizations have administered independent surveys related to internship:
• The American Institute of Architecture Students conducted a study in 1992.
• Building Community: A New Future for Architecture Education and Practice generated another in the early- to mid-1990s.
• 1999 Collateral Internship Summit sparked two very thorough studies, one conducted by the AIA and the other by NCARB.
• 2001 NCARB Practice Analysis, which produced a statistically insignificant intern response of less than 5 percent, remains the most recent.

None of these studies has been conducted more than once, which would be necessary to enable the profession to analyze trends. Accordingly, the real key to usefulness of the 2003 Internship & Career Survey is that it be conducted at regular intervals, like other AIA market studies. If we want a knowledge-based profession, we need to incorporate that commitment into our redesign of the profession generally and make long-term policy decisions informed by trends and information gathered over a period of time.

In developing this survey, an ArchVoices/NAC working group drew on many of the aforementioned survey devices while also acknowledging that there is some information on young professionals embedded in ongoing market surveys, such as the AIA Compensation Survey and AIA Firm Survey. What these efforts show consistently is that the “traditional path to registration” is changing in significant ways. Indeed, this is a critical time for all the profession to study and respond to significant trends in internship and registration.

How can you help?
Ask your unlicensed or recently licensed colleagues and employees to complete the 2003 Internship & Career Survey. If they didn’t get a personal invitation to do so, chances are that they are neither an AIA member nor a subscriber of ArchVoices newsletter. A reasonable follow-up question would be, “Why not?” By no coincidence, this question also is asked on the survey as it remains a topic of great interest for the AIA.

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