Architecture A levels & Requirements/Aptitude?

[teta]

I’m posting this on behalf of dd2 currently in year 10. And I’m generally looking for advice from anyone with experience or knowledge. She’s expected to do well in her GCSEs and attends a very academic school. Good at Art and Maths and has always been highly creative and interested in design from a very young age. Also very astute and I suspect would be very good in business.
She’s not sure what she wants to do and her school is very much into professional jobs based on Maths and Sciences. I’ve been thinking about Architecture for her but know absolutely nothing about it. Would she be the right sort of person for a career in this?

Learning does tend to halt when you work from home and don’t interact in a dynamic office. A niche job isn’t what a new grad can get when qualified. Most young people would never do this for years.

Once again RIBA is the best source of information. It’s up to date and relevant.

Actually respectfully Bubbles I completely disagree. My learning has not halted at all and I often didn't find the interactions in the office to be "dynamic." In this day and age there are more ways of "interacting" than getting in a car or a bus and commuting an hour to work in a too small office with poor lighting and bad seating doing a day of drafting and phone calls that could be much more comfortably and efficiently done from home.
Of course a new grad isn't going to get a niche job, but the reason I have one and managed to keep working right through the recession despite having to keep a very sick child alive, was because when I began working as a new grad (albeit older as this is a second career), I was very careful to note what I had not learned at university (pretty much anything useful like construction or codes or budgets or permitting etc.) and made sure that I learned that in the working world. I spent my summers working for contractors while at university and once I worked in an architecture firm I "interacted" with all the consultants to make sure that I understood exactly what they were doing and how it interacted with my architecture. And I volunteered for all the small jobs that involved doing all aspects of the field.

All of this is to say, that although a new grad won't be working in a niche job, it can be helpful to be aware of and develop those skills right from the start.

Your sound like you don’t value colleagues and collaborative working. My DH also kept many employed through the recession and they have been going for 40 years.

No, Bubbles I just live in the 21st century in Los Angeles where there are better and more modern/environmentally friendly ways to interact with my colleagues and collaborate than driving/commuting an hour each way into an office. I am not really understanding why you are so vested in trying to diminish my working experience (which I have been very happy with) or deny the possibility that there may be more than one way to do things and that not all of them are your way.

office with poor lighting and bad seating

I was going to say that we have rules about an employer's respondibility to ensure that their employees are not subject to such things, but then you mentioned that you are in the US, where there may not be an equivalent of our workplace health, safety and welfare regulations?

Marching...

Have you been through the whole hot-desking large open plan office, artificial lighting, thing? Not fun, and not always productive, whatever the health and safety regs.

I am not so sure where this is going, but surely lots of employers are motivated to encourage attendance only when needed, thereby saving London office costs.

I also agree with niche skills, though don't know about this area. Being the go-to person on something, as long as managers recognise this (sadly they don't always) can really help job security.

It can. However a new architetural grad will not have acquired these niche skills. As Sophia says, she is 25 years down the line. It is very different. DH has niche skills. He is very well paid for his niche skills! He did not have them at age 24. The thread was about what a young person could expect, not someone in a second career who is very much older and works from home.

The architectgural pratices I know are pleasant places to work. They foster a creative admosphere and use this as a way to recruit and keep good staff.

Needmoresleep, yes thanks, but admittedly for an employer no doubt regarded by many as mainly being a drain on the economy. I'm sure there are plenty of public sector employers adopting the general attitude of Reggie Perrin's boss, but our little corner of it was, on the whole, pretty mindful of their responsibilities - including reminding us of ours. (Which is why I felt compelled to ask the chap - part of whose rôle was H&S overlord - who came to fit a new lightbulb in our windowless WC whether it was himself I should report him to, when he asked if I could get him a chair to stand on. But I digress...).

It does depend on what you are designing, a multi occupancy building in a heritage area can have someone tied up for a long time. I know one person who spent four years on a single site. Soul destroying according to my DS who likes to flitter between commercial units, restaurants on the coast and dream homes. Your niche may evolve over time or you may be a butterfly who likes the challenge of a changing challenge. But never forget your bread and butter clients, in a recession when house sales/thecommercial sector stall, families grow and need extensions or granny annexes.

Marching, me too, though less great. QUANGO managed by bright young things, who knew how to tick target boxes but little else. Very little credit given to long-standing junior staff who could help you out with the archaic computer system. Chiefs counted, not Indians, and rainbow lanyards ruled. Who cared if you could walk the walk as long as you could talk the talk and the message was positive. There were a few architects even, but more typically Antipodeans on working holiday visas.

My understanding is that the employment market is not always that great for architects. And that some end up filling in niche detail for large schemes. But not my field.

Marching Frogs I wish that rules about employer responsibility actually got followed. I worked for two different architectural firms while in London. One (medium sized) was so horrific that I left after 2 weeks (one employee walked out at lunch on his first day, he hated it so much). The other (small) was better, but still a hellhole. My experiences in Los Angeles (4 different firms small- medium sized) were really very similar. Los Angeles has pretty strong rules regarding employer responsibility, but that doesn't mean they get followed and that doesn't mean that they are required to provide daylight, or non-florescent lighting and/or an ergonomically correct chair or temperature levels that are suited to women rather than men (there is some pretty good research that says that a desirable office temperature for women is generally warmer than for men).

Regarding the niche skills. I am using them 25 years down the line, but I started actively acquiring them while still in architecture school and proactively developed them along the way. When I first started, my niche was that I knew how to draft on computer which most people back in those dark ages didn't, but it soon became apparent that that wouldn't be a niche for very long and that as I got older, the 23 year olds fresh out of uni were always going to be faster than me, so I proactively figured out a niche that would ripen with age rather than get old and dry....:)