Introduction to the Practice Management Exam

The practice management exam is the first of the six ARE 5.0 exams and it's an unusual one 'cause if the point of the NCARB ARE is to protect the health, safety and welfare of the public by making sure that architects are competent, it's an interesting question of like, why would one of the exams be what's really effectively about how to run a business, how to run an architecture business? And the answer to that is that when it really comes down to it, it is actually a fairly logical situation because in fact, protecting the health, safety and welfare of the public including protecting the needs of the clients, protecting the industry overall, the architectural industry, protecting the actual public out in the world, it does actually matter that you know how to run a business and that you know how the financial process, the employment process, how all those things roll together to create the opportunity for development.

So it's kind of odd, but in the grand scheme of things, it actually makes a bit of sense.

The other thing to note is that NCARB did a very large survey a little while back and that survey was of architects, young architects, older architects, people who ran businesses, clients, all of those different types of folks and from that survey, they were able to gather a bunch of information and one of the biggest pieces of information that they got from that was that there was a very large desire for people to understand better how the specifics of an architectural business are actually run in order to have better employees, to have better offices, to have things run more in line with the laws and regulations that govern these types of things and so from that survey came this exam.

They've decided that it really made sense for this to be its own exam. Now this will be the smallest of the six exams. It has a specific viewpoint. There'll be quite a bit of overlap with the project management exam, the number two exam, in the 5.0 series.

It has this very specific sensibility which is the idea of how do you hold together an active practice in architecture? So what are the kinds of things that we're gonna be talking about? It's a whole series of professional practice issues and those professional practice issues are gonna be fiduciary responsibilities so financial issues, legal consequences, things like that. There'll be a whole discussion about ethics and what it means to be a professional.

There is a very odd thinking about that term like a lot of the terms that we'll talk about today. They have many meanings. You can be a professional football player. You can be a professional all sorts of different things, but when we talk about professional in this context, it actually is a state sanctioned very specific set of issues that are about protecting the safety of the public so it has its own very specific meanings for us. We'll also be talking about employee management issues and what it means to put together a team so we have a team of people working on any given project.

We have engineers and consultants on lighting and all of those sorts of things. We have environmental specialists. We have bankers. We all have kinds of different people who are gonna be part of the team of people who are gonna make a project go forward and so understanding how that team is combined and orchestrated for specific projects, that would be part of this discussion. And then we're also gonna talk about business development so how a firm gets projects, how you move through the process of keeping a business alive.

All of those issues put together are gonna create the overall discussion about practice management, understanding how business works and the legal and fiduciary responsibilities that make up the envelope that that sits in. So let's jump into practice management.

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