There are three key components of being an AXP supervisor:
- Exercising direct supervision over your candidate
- Helping your candidate create a strategy to gain the experience needed to complete the AXP
- Providing coaching and instruction throughout a project, followed by reviewing your candidate’s experience reports
Be sure to take NCARB’s Continuum Education course for AXP supervisors to help you better understand your role—and earn CE credit!
Exercising Direct Supervision
To be an AXP supervisor, you must have direct supervision over your candidate. You are responsible for your candidate’s work on a daily basis and have the professional knowledge to certify that the work performed meets an architect’s standard of care.
Direct supervision can occur through face-to-face contact or remote communication, as long as you maintain responsibility for the candidate’s work.
Assigning Work Opportunities
As a supervisor, you must help your candidate create a strategy to gain the experience needed to complete the AXP. Candidates need to develop the competency to perform 96 tasks spanning six experience areas. Because of this, your candidate will need to work in a variety of roles. As your candidate progresses along the path to licensure, you can help them expand their skills by assigning opportunities across each of the experience areas, or pointing them toward opportunities outside your firm.
Learn more about the different AXP experience areas and settings, as well as the supervision requirements involved.
Reviewing Experience Reports
Candidates demonstrate their development of competency by continuously improving their performance—and ultimately completing their work accurately and independently. They record progress in the AXP by submitting hourly experience reports that document their work. Your candidate will need to document a total of 3,740 hours across the six experience areas to complete the AXP.
As an AXP supervisor, you must review each experience report your candidate submits and verify that the information it contains is accurate. After you’ve reviewed the report, you’ll have the opportunity to approve the report, return the report for edits, or reject the report entirely. You should meet with your candidate regularly to determine expectations for their ongoing work experience and reporting.
Note: You should only reject reports if the information they contain is entirely false—for example, the candidate did not work for you or did not perform AXP-related work at that time. Learn more about reviewing experience reports.
