This is a double hit, with firms having both an absolute shortage of staff and a deficiency in staff with 8 to 10 years of experience, those best suited to train the more junior colleagues. When coupled with clients expectations for fast delivery, there is little opportunity to devote to training. This inadequacy of training may well lead to serious problems in the ongoing leadership and management transition in which many firms will be or will want to be immersed in the next decade. Leaders of design firms continue to become more aware of and committed to the notion of carefully selecting the clients they will serve and the projects they will undertake. With strong backlogs and staff shortages, firms are taking to heart the concept that they can best serve the clients whose values most parallel their own.
Most firms give more talk than action to advancing women to leadership and senior management roles.
This is less a knock on the profession and individual practitioners and more a statement of reality. Able and experienced women architects are simply in short supply. The positive aspect, however, is that there are young women practitioners with the intelligence, skill, and drive to lead practices, and these same people are getting the experience that will advance them to very significant roles in the current practices. And those who believe that their firm limits their opportunities may well become part of the growing number of new and prospering firms in the Northwest. On the subject of new firms, several that are less than two years old have won significant commissions, some in competition with the firms they left.