Reply To: Has anyone successfully transitioned out of the Landscape Architecture field?

Clarification:

There is a big difference between thinking like an owner and acting like an owner. The last thing any principal wants is an inexperienced person trying to tell them how things should be done by acting like they own the place.

Thinking like an owner is to try to understand their perspective and then try to execute your own job in such a way that is in sync with the owners perspective.

To think like an owner, among other things, empowers you to perceive what you should do in the position that you hold to maximize your contribution for the benefit of the owner. This should increase your value to the owner. Conserving company resources, looking for ways to make things easier for your coworkers, and adding to a positive office culture are good habits to build. 

Then there is observing how everything works like an owner. What kinds of work is actually going on? Where is that work coming from? Who is getting it? What seems to be the mechanism that is keeping some firms busy while others limp along. You don’t have to try to tell your boss how to run his business, but the more you observe and the more you learn, the better is your mind set for preparing to fill a more viable position within the company or somewhere else.

You never should attempt to tell your boss how to do things, but you can talk about your observations and ask if they perceive the same things. The discourse is going to be beneficial because you’ll learn how your employer thinks about things. He or she may give you more information that may confirm your understanding or maybe give you more insight based on their experiences that teaches you something new altogether. Either way, you’ll gain a lot more knowledge than you will from banging out tasks and waiting for someone to give you better tasks. 

The whole point of the two years under an LA, in my opinion, is not to get better at doing tasks, but to get the chance to observe and learn how the business works from the inside as you are doing those tasks. 

If you find yourself in a peripheral job situation like I did,  take the knowledge that you can from it. It was in a civil office where I learned what others like about certain LAs and what they did not like. I learned why some were referred and others were not. I saw all kinds of projects done by all kinds of professionals and non-professionals and learned how each fit in the big picture. Eventually, I learned enough to see where I could carve a niche where I had the most competitive advantage.

I draw the same plans I drew 10 or 12 years ago. You don’t advance by how long you do the same tasks. You advance by understanding the actual market around you and positioning yourself to get sucked up by it. You can do that any way that you can.  If you can do that in an LA office, great. If you can do that in a civil engineer’s office, just as good. You can do it sitting as a volunteer on a regulatory board in your community. …. and other places, too. Some places are easier than others to figure out what is going on. You have to be patient and relentless.

I’m not sure about the rest of the country, but here in Massachusetts, a very heavily regulated state, you can have just as much success without a stamp as with a stamp. I suspect it is more the norm than not.