Let's see ... your skills are 10 years stale, they weren't particularly advanced when you left, there are at least three generations of software evolution since then, your competition is 10 years younger and willing to work for peanuts in a highly competitive market ... what is it exactly that makes you an attractive candidate - your infinitely superior aesthetics?

Hi BackAgain -

What did you do over the last 10 years might be helpful to know.  All those nay-sayers just think architecture is a singularity profession, and you need to be a cad-monkey in an office to prove your worth. 

If you were way outside the practice and left because you were disenchanted, or raising a family [which is a profession] then you might consider doing a 1 year post professional somewhere to build upon the 10 years skills.

Best wishes

Be prepared to compete against younger folks. I consider myself one of the "younger" folk, and I was not accepted for a certain position after multiple rounds of interviews, because someone with 12 years more experience asked for much lesser money than me (and I was not even asking that much). This profession is rough on the old.

On the other hand, in the long run, most architects dont "make it" till very late in their careers, so you got some time.

I second the opinion of doing a 1 year post-professional course, it could bring you back to speed rather fast.

Not to bitch any more about the profession, but there are other disciplines that you could thrive in with your experience.

Learn Revit, Dynamo and Rhino - if you do that and do it well, then I should not be too much of  problem - that is as long as you are good at it - be prepared to take a test - 

Become a Project Manager... but you have to sell your Project Management experience.... if you have any...

Some here are right, the profession is really tough on old farts….I’m 64 and retired, thankfully owned my own firm, but I saw it repeatedly. Had one uprising were all the young jockeys came in as a group and said they were all going to quit…”the old guy is screwing up all the files!”. I felt like firing the whole lot! Let him go though. In another case a few years later had it happen again with a new group who came in and wanted an old guy gone because he was talking too much (he was sharing work experience for God sake!)….they all wore headphones and wanted to be left alone. I let him go too, but this time took away everybody’s headphones.

I don’t know BackAgain. I’m going to write a piece on my Blog about this soon….you must be seeing it where you are stationed by now. The work environment has gotten toxic. I think too that the CAD hill is too steep. Its not enough to know CAD, there are layer upon layer of refinements now. Best place for an aspiring old fart is field administration; the young guns seem to leave these guys alone.

Please allow me to amend. 40 is not too old dam it! God, thinking, hell I’ve got kids who are 40, you are in the prime of your life! What I said though is true and just bare in mind as you twinkle. This CAD thing I think could be a stopper. Obviously do not know your current capabilities…if you are not current and really good you’ll need to be. You’ll have to OCD this thing. If you do try to go back realize that they will only let you into production at first, but if you are really good/fast and take on things nobody else wants to do like shop drawings and the like…try to be your bosses bitch and do some of his/her work too….my kids do this and it works….just get good and blow them out of the water! But remember to keep your mouth shut.

p.s. also consider a small firm/environment. Also really work on getting licenced, that will be a big help too.

Carerra:

I'm a project architect and I spend 80% of my time doing REVIT drawings; all phases of design including managing changes during construction. I don't exactly admire that distinction.

My Theory: architects now spend MORE time managing REVIT models than they do mangaing PROJECTS! I'm in a 175 person firm .. we have people to just build model groups, teach modeling best practices, rendering people, ppl obsessed with 'modeling and using REVIT to it's best capibility'.... etc... we now MODEL in 3D everything down to the base tile!!! LOL It's ludicrous and SO TIME CONSUMING! So having a little bit of say since I'm 30, licensed and not a revit monkey.. i typically tell people to quit wasting their fcking time modeling bullshit that may be noted.. it's toxic and becoming a habit for young architects (and even older drafters) to model in 3D for the sake of modeling in 3D because they're using a 3D program.

Drawings used to be so much less complex with less info (also yielded LESS problems and lawsuits because contractors had TO ASK what to do)....and architects spent more time on site. Now; we take hours to detail something / model in the drawings - that would take 5 minutes on site to talk about .. this is where the use of technology has lost efficiency because architects don't understand how to use their time (ALSO a problem coming out of school and not understanding time mgmt and being efficient with fee)... instead, young students are obsessed with 'rendering pretty pictures' and ask me if they 'get to do the rendering' ... of course this leads to underdeveloped architects who - like you imply - who do not get to learn the practice of MASTER BUILDER because they know more about PHOTOSHOP tools than they do construction and managment ... having their headphones on.

Aw man. I am 29 and I have headphones in while photoshopping the shit out of the financial district right now..

I'M A FAILURE.

*weeps over "high quality" master's' degree obtained in design-focused Scandinavian country*

*continues to listen to EDM*

*my life is worth more than cadding tiles and other stupid details that don't metter*

Back Again: After 10 years you can still come back. The typical team make up is still the same. Supported now by specialized technology teams. I'd look to start at a small firms under 30 people if i was you.  That would be the best way to re involve yourself, and you wont have the big office "politics" to deal with.  just on a smaller scale. project deliverable have not changed you still need Construction Documentation for legal reasons among others. Back Again Id also like to encourage you to learn what BIM is, good news for you is that just now in the year 2014 Architecture firms are just now starting to speak about BIM and its software years before it was just "oh lets throw a revit guy in there". I've been using advanced software since we still had to read books to learn about it.

Pale Shelter: I hear where you are coming from. I first delved into architecture software my 1st year in college a very long time ago, so long ago that the new interns coming in today were probably just hitting puberty.

I am still relatively young and feel fortunate to have learned from the 1990s to early 2000 technology crowed through college and my first internship. Which gave a firm foundation.

I think that the people of my generation to some degree not all were lucky enough to start out learning from these no offense intended "old guys" and there is a very very large gap in terms of what the under 30 architecture crowd knows today, compared with the under 30 crowd I met when I first started. I'm part of the first crowd by the way. So I read about technology as much as i read building codes, building methods, specifications anyways. people dont read anymore they you tube it.

Due to this lack of a foundation I've noticed an obsession  with people wanting to set up "standards" in other words today we have a new era the  "copy other people and lets go play softball at 5pm era" not gonna say generation "era" because its a mix of young and old. ask them to draw you a typical wall types sheet and watch them scramble like chickens looking for "typical details" all over the server.

Pale Shelter here are some comments of mine to yours:

  "architects now spend MORE time managing REVIT models"

  "a problem coming out of school and not understanding time mgmt and being efficient with fee)."

  "we have people to just build model groups, teach modeling best practices, rendering people, ppl obsessed with 'modeling and using REVIT to it's best capibility'.... etc... we now MODEL in 3D everything"

There are several factors contributing to this the first one is architecture offices do not understand that they need an architect who is an expert with software, or they do not want to pay what that person is worth.  I was lucky enough to know the old technology and frame of mind before mastering most technology used today. I have to say that currently Architecture offices do not understand how a BIM project needs to be managed or set up. Consequently interns or people who are versed but not experts with for example Revit are sort of managing the project. These people know the technology, enough to get by, but do not know project management, or even what a traditional set looks like. there first exposure to interning was lets just say not the same quality that i we saw 10 years ago. Those old guys have retired or were wiped out by the great recession, or are so far up the corporate chain the they dont get involved anymore.

Back again sorry for the long post all the best of luck to you

pale shelter, I love/hate your entire post on Revit!  When I first learned 2D CAD from doing hand drafting it took a serious effort to not draw too much detail in CAD simply because I could zoom in to larger than full scale.  Learning to be efficient in how you communicate the intent is a major skill that apparently is being lost.  I hadn't even considered how exponentially worse that tendency would be with 3D.  Ugh.