'Your Part iii toolkit'

When someone other than yourself is reading your PDA for the first time (remembering that we are reading anywhere from four to seven different candidates’ work in one sitting of examinations), our focus is not on a simple biography of events that make up your career to date, but what are your criticisms, opinions and understandings of the role of the architect in practice through the lens of your experience.

How you got into architecture might reflect on the importance of early access to the profession through reach-out programmes, or the technology and software that you explored in your masters is something that you’ve tried to integrate into your practice, perhaps even unsuccessfully, but it governs your views of how the profession is changing in the future.

Each work experience (why did you enjoy working at that office? How important is studio culture to you? Is a lack of transparency demotivating?), course (was it a competitive environment? How did it best prepare you for practice? In light of proposed shake-ups to the Part system, what would you propose?), hobby and interest (Should all architects be capable of coding in 5-10 years? How are you upskilling to prepare for the Retrofit revolution we so desperately need? How important is craft in large-scale projects that are largely designed for manufacture and assembly?) cited is an opportunity to express your own understanding and opinion.

 Use novel ways to review and compare your experiences against one another. For example, I read of one candidate who created a simple two-column table expressing on the left ‘what I expected’ and on the right ‘what actually happened’ in an almost ‘Instagram vs Reality’ comparison. Instantly, this format forced the candidate to be critical about each of their courses and past employers not necessarily against themselves but against his own readiness and understanding of what the role entailed.

Equally, there have been others who have ‘scored’ their experiences in a five-star amazon review style, which leads readers down new paths of unforeseen insight and self-reflection. What caused one experience to be rated one-star for staff morale and four stars for design satisfaction? 

Seek new and interesting ways to present, review, compare and analyse your career to date.

 Sorry to be boring and have to raise the subject of CV’s, but when it comes to the PDA it’s important to remember that we are asked to mark this as if it was a professional application for an open position in practice. It’s a boring reminder, but put the effort in to present it smartly, with clear succinct breakdowns of the projects you’ve worked on at various practices, the types of roles and responsibilities you completed, the stages you covered, the contract value, the project type, etc. Soft skills and competencies shouldn’t be forgotten or undersold and remember that this is the first thing we see when we open this document so don’t underestimate how important first impressions are and how often we return to this as a contents page of your professional career to date! 

 Naturally the Part III course operates as quite a pivotal moment in many candidates’ careers where upon qualifying they’re already planning in their head future job applications, re-aligning their interests with their professional ambitions or simply relocating elsewhere. This shouldn’t be overlooked as a simple ‘onto the next one’ piece of text but viewed as the crescendo to the build-up that you have consciously (or even subconsciously) been feeding through the PDA up to this point.

It goes without saying that not everyone is expected to become a traditional architect in practice, with some candidates completing the Part III simply through an obligatory guilt before fashioning a move into something else. But what is most interesting is how you demonstrate the cumulative experiences you’ve witnessed to date have contributed to you having this outlook and how, even if you are seeking non-traditional opportunities, it doesn’t compromise your understanding of the knowledge, competency and duty of care you should be exercising as an architect. 

 That’s the best title I could come up with because writing ‘CPDs’ would be criminally boring, but it’s true, in the face of sustainability, fire safety, overheating, planning reform and technological advancements - it’s naive to treat the Part III as a conclusive ‘end’. Whether you are requested to have a CPD Plan or not on your course, I recommend preparing one. Not necessarily because it’s the most important item I want candidates to focus on, but rather because it is the silliest of items to stumble and be questioned upon. Having a visual plan for the next twelve months, hand-picking CPD’s you want to attend/conduct, satisfying the minimum hours across the ten mandatory topics in both structured and unstructured ways that hopefully ties in with the ambitions you’ve outlined in your PDA up to the present day is a clear demonstration of a commitment to the profession and shouldn’t just be treated as the ‘icing on the cake’.