The folks at Black Spectacles have shared with us some pretty insightful intelligence about what software skills and licensure/accreditation are most required to land you a job at the world's Top 50 architecture firms.
Compare below if you've got what it takes, and then head over to the Archinect Job Board to land your next big gig. Many of the listed Top 50 firms are currently hiring!
"We surveyed 928 job postings at the top 50 architecture firms, based on Architectural Record's July 2013 Top 300 Architecture Firms study, and compiled the software requirements and the licensure/accreditation requirements listed for each job. We then sorted them by average, and then by the experience level required, from 0-3, 4-10 and 11-20+.
The results are in the infographic below."
(Click on the graphic to get a more detailed view)
"In summary, for software skills, over 70% of architecture jobs require Revit skills, and over 50% still require AutoCAD skills. The #3 software skill required is Sketchup. We must admit that we were disappointed (but not surprised) to see that Grasshopper was only required for 3% of the jobs. And good old-fashioned hand-sketching was only explicitly called out in 4% of these jobs.
Software skill requirements fell predictably along experience lines, with lower experience requiring more software skills. The exceptions were in AutoCAD & Photoshop where the difference between the requirements of 0-3 years & 11-20 years of experience was over 20%. The next largest difference was in Revit at 14%.
For licensure/accreditation we were very surprised to see that only 10% of jobs required licensure, but 25% required LEED Accreditation. The requirements for licensure/accreditation fell predictably along experience lines, with lower experience requiring less licensure/accreditation.
Below is a list of the firms that were surveyed. We took the top 25 Architecture firms and the top 25 Architecture + Engineering firms for our survey.
This survey is obviously skewed to larger firms. We are interested in expanding this survey to smaller firms, and would like your suggestions for where to find a good sample of smaller architecture firms- please add your thoughts in the comments below."
A Firms:
AE Firms:
8 Comments
Please help. Maybe I'm looking at it wrong. From what I have seen, is not Revit a 3-dimensional version of/for AutoCAD. I make this statement because I really want to understand the difference.
Ah! Now i know why the top firms produce SHIT! Its because they love sketchup...
are they looking for people who know how to regurgitate shit by using these tools? to be fair, even sketchup can be useful if what you input is good enough. there is no reason sketchup should limit you any more than hand sketching or whatever else. i think the problem might be these firms are asking 'can you swing a hammer' instead of asking if their employees are smart enough to know when, where, and why to swing a hammer, or if they're able to learn how to use new tools assuming someday maybe you'll want to use a pneumatic hammer instead of the broken old piece of junk they were using 10 years ago.
it's sad that being capable and trying to do a good job is now more of a liability than an asset.
chris, revit is different than autocad. i think you can compare it to photoshop and illustrator. same company, sometimes they might be used for similar things, but ultimately they're quite a bit different.
There is just no respect for lego skills anymore.
^-- completely replaced by minecraft. it's not right.
Thank you for a much needed laugh. On a more serious note I hadn't noticed any mention of rhino...
Vinny -
Rhino was never meant for architecture, I used a very early release in 1999 to do a school project as it was free for 30 days at the time, at the time any 3D modeling program was about the same. It's was really meant for industrial design and fabrication.
For a long time the rendering quality was bad but then as of recently it became respectable, mainly due to the VRay plugin. VRAY is an independent company that makes one of the best rendering engines for Rhino, Sketchup, and 3dsMax.
David Rutten developed cool scripts about 8-9 years ago which were free at the time and would do amazing things for architects. In 2007 it was all about scripting in Rhino right before Grasshopper came out. When Grasshopper came out all of Rutten's free scripts disappeared off the web and last I checked - my LinkedIn says Rutten is a Rhino employee (whatever the mother company name is - McNeel or something).
There have been other 'parametric' plugin programs since developed in other softwares like 3dsMax by Torabi Architect and others that essentially do what Grasshopper does, but 3dsMax isn't really made for fabrication, more for animation so I often covert from 3dsMax to SolidWorks or Rhino format for the fabricator to verify and clean the models - usually pretty successful.
In short whatever Grasshopper and Rhino can do for the architect can pretty much be done now in Autodesk products as well, and since Autodesk has such a stranglehold on the AEC tool market, you won't see Rhino up there.
Rhino is considerably less expensive than Revit or 3dsMax, but even then it appears to have been more of a fad because of essentially one guy - David Rutten, than an essential tool of the market.
Whatever you can do in Rhino+Grasshopper can be done in Revit+Dynamo(sim to grasshopper) - that being said, Rhino is great in school where students need to easily get to the design forms. I myself used Maya in school, then switched to Revit. Check out Revit kid.com for info on dynamo
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