By Paul Preiss
Iasa began its journey to develop and grow a profession for business & technology architects over 22 years ago. One cornerstone to achieving this vision has always been developing the skills of architects globally from aspiring to distinguished through learning, training and skills development. A challenge in doing this on a global scale has always been the ability to schedule courses and training for small groups or individuals in different time zones, with differing availability to attend classes, etc. A further challenge was also providing a learning solution that could scale to hundreds of participants in large organisations without diminishing the quality of delivery by Iasa’s Distinguished Architect instructors. We now have a platform to address these challenges! The first course available on this platform is our Core class (CITA-F), soon to be followed by all Iasa courses, mentoring and coaching offerings.
You can now take Core at any time, anywhere in the world as an individual or large group, through the Iasa mentoring platform. Sign up, be assigned a (CITA-P/D) mentor, and begin the program!
Find out more and register here.
A New Age of Professionalism through Mentoring
I have been finishing this dream I’ve had for about twelve years. Whew, that sounds long when you write it that way.
The dream and the vision are simple to say and very hard to get implemented. That dream is to have a robust and full mentoring method for architects throughout their careers. And to do so with rigor and an ability to create repeatable results. And we have finally come to the ability to deliver that dream.
We have created a mentoring program that will help both individuals and organizations learn to deliver the same results as the very best architects in the world. And to do so repeatably! The mentoring method, which has taken us two years to pilot and test, has results that astound me.
Benefits to You:
- Build a deep relationship with a very senior architect
- Learn with a cohort of peers in real-life scenarios
- Experience over theory – the skills you didn’t know you needed
- Learning pathways designed by architects for architects, regardless of internal practice maturity
- Quality outputs graded against your own work and level of skill
- Certification based on demonstration, not just testing
Doing Architecture… Extremely Well
In English, the word rigor means to ‘do something thoroughly or extremely well’. Rigor is a thing of science. It is a thing of excellence. It is what we expect from any competent professional. And yet, it is a thing I have found lacking throughout architecture in real practices.
How we learn architecture has a lot to do with how we practice it. “Architecture is about experience” is a tenet of the BTABoK put there by Scott Whitmire, CITA-D and Iasa Board Member. In fact rigor is about doing something over and over again until you are perfect at it. This is the core of a mentoring method. It is at the core of medicine. It is at the core of building architecture.
However, to achieve repeatable professional results also means that mentees have to be doing the same things over and over again. To create similar professionals, we have to create similar professional experiences while not getting behind best practices or getting too far ahead into unproven ones. This is the power of the BTABoK and the Iasa Mentoring Method. It is based on the open-source power of community knowledge and the profession’s ability to shape that into curriculum and learning.
Why Should You Care
The goal of mentoring is to take an architect and improve your skills experientially. To learn a new concept and to apply that concept under the tutalage and leadership of a truly capable mentor. This is the heart of how humans learn complex skills and concepts.
The method we designed was based on a combination of how doctors and building architects are mentored. This makes our program deeply experiential. It creates similar experiences to the most successful senior architects in the world. And it makes those experiences available to you. In addition as this leads to board certification the program:
- Create massive validation and value in professional status.
- Creates repeatable architect skills (no more different types of skills based on employers).
- It reduces the cost of architecture employment by 30-50% making higher salaries and better outcomes possible.
- It increases the valuable output of architects by 25-40% based on repeating successful results.
- It is international and thus allows for architect to flourish globally.
- It will help you solve real problems in your organization and projects.
- It connect university, junior and senior architecture programs to the same baseline of competencies, outcomes and practices.
- It is open-source so it is always as modern as it can be without being based only in trends.
How It Works
The mentoring program is designed to scale with you and the profession. In each mentoring engagement you will receive a set of materials which support a set of tasks. These tasks are the important part. The experience of completing these tasks with the direct supervision of a senior mentor allows you to make mistakes and learn from them without endangering career, but it also allows you to avoid mistakes that have already been learned. The programs group into 3-6 month engagements which grow in complexity depending on your mastery level! For an example mentoring engagement you can look at the Core Structured Mentoring: Mentoring – IASA Netherlands
Competency-Based
The foundation of any profession is its competencies. The Iasa Competency Model, first built in 2007, has been the backbone of our training and certifications for years. And it has stood the test of time and usage. It is in use officially in dozens of companies around the world. And unofficially, hundreds more. The mentoring program aims to develop architects in all five pillars of the competency model. For more about the competency model: Competency | IASA – BTABoK
Note: It is deeply important the competency model be structured well. Just having a list of skills does NOT hold up well over time and career paths.
It is Career Path Focused
The hardest part of mentoring is matching the learning and experience to a mentees current level. For it isnt enough to simply have competencies, the system must support those competencies at different levels of the journey. For example, I may be working design skills such as decomposition or pattern languages, or human dynamics skills like leadership or communication. An architect at the associate stage of their career will need an entirely different set of mentoring modules than one at the board certified professional level. This difference requires signficant focus on the development of skills that grow through a career and the creation of different learning and practice materials at all stages.
It Works for Organizations
Shawn McCarthy, Chief Architect, is leading our Atlas Program. This program creates a repeatable teaching ‘hospital’ model for architects within an organizational context. This program creates a special form of teaching in organizations where you learn concepts along with techniques by actually doing them. It has huge benefits for both the individual and the organization.
It Unites the Specializations
Probably the hardest part of our mentoring is dealing with the different ‘types’ of architects. The professional business architect and professional software architect seem on the surface to be very different professionals! But through our research of thousands of these professionals we have found something very powerful. At the beginning of their careers most of these successful architects had similar experiences. In fact if you look at the model for competencies you will find that the 5 pillars represent the skills of both professionals quite well with different emphasis. You will also find that the specialization skills are very well aligned with later stages of a career. The power of this model is obvious. It creates a common mentoring pathway that first creates architects, then creates specialists like business, software, infrastructure, information and solution!