Where to move

Your next move does not have to be permanent. You might look for where there is growth in the things that you are most qualified and/or experienced in. This is a slow profession as career building is concerned. Patience is everything.

My understanding is that the area around DC has the most growth. You have to look for areas of growth and weigh whether or not it is viable to go there for a couple of years or not. It will be easier to get hired where you want to be when the economy heats up if you have been working in a related field than if you live in the same city and work at Walmart.

Harness the energy of something that is already happening. … if you can find something happening.

If LA jobs are hard to score, hit civil site planning firms, especially smaller local ones. They sometimes feel more comfortable knowing an LA doing civil site plans is not going to open a CE office across the street and you should have more plan drawing experience than a CE student coming out of school. It worked for me.

I agree to “move to where the food is” to borrow an old Sam Kinnison punchline.Unfortunately, many firms seem to be in a ‘local only’ hiring mode still. DC isn’t growing all that much job-wise, and is very instable still (I hear of occasional layoffs in the AEC inudstry to this day) and the market here is very, very saturated with many, many, many involuntarily former LAs and fresh regional grads. Living in the DC market myself, I’ve been sending a great deal of resumes to Florida, California, and a number to Texas. On the west coast, LA and around San Diego seem to be where the most postings I have seen are located. It depends what your specialty is and what you want to do, as the residential market is offering many more positions than commercial/institutional, and for those you have to look for on diffferent channels than other than ASLA.

Sounds like your hearts in the West and near family.  Those are the places I would venture too.  Nothing like having a support network to encourage you to get the ball rolling.  I have seen a lot of job postings for LA’s in California, and most of these were not even posted on the ASLA website.  Get to a location and focus on the market, start NETWORKING.  Don’t concentrate so much on what you might find on Monster, CareerBuilder or ASLA.  Those jobs are filled before you even start looking.  Getting lost in the cyber black hole is the most frustrating thing.  If you have a sister in LA, maybe live with her for awhile if she will let you and concentrate your efforts on that market.  Join the local ASLA chapter.  Here in Chicago they have networking events all the time I am sure the same is true in LA.  But don’t just stick with your own kind.  Seek out networking events sponsered by AIA or Civil Engineering.  Maybe just a general networking event just to get to know people.  Getting to know people and making friends will help you learn the area.  Moving in with sis might be good to begin with but maybe you don’t like where she lives.  Don’t be afraid to stretch your wings and find what works for you.

One of my classmates from the U of I ’97 just got a job in Austin.

A couple of observations that I have made about where I am and what makes things work here got me thinking and having lived and landscaped in the town that Roland is in also got me thinking.

First, Moscow, Idaho is a great place to live and a lousy place to be a landscape architect. It is too small, the demographic does not lend itself to a strong landscape contracting or maintenance market let alone a design market, it is isolated so that you can’t work other communities effectively (except for Pullman WA which is also too small). I had to move in order to do what I wanted to do career wise. … and being two university towns (U Idaho, WSU) there are enough stuck students with LA degrees hanging around to completely kill any value you might otherwise have in that town.

My current area of Cape Cod has unique circumstances of its own. You have a year ’round population that is largely middle to lower income and ocean front vacation properties of very wealthy people who do not live and work here. That means a lot of benefits for LAs. First, we are not dependent on the local economy or school systems to control the value of real estate on water front homes because they are owned by people in Boston, NY, DC, England, Ohio, …. (the other real estate is dependent on the local economy and is hurting). Some of these distant homeowners can no longer afford their second homes here making new opportunities for other wealthy people to scoop up a waterfront home.

That means that there are still houses getting purchased for over a million, being razed and replaced with a couple more million being spent. Although the place is geographically small, the market demographic extends far and wide.

It also means that the property owners are not hands on at all simply because they can’t be here. They need and want people taking control of their project, so they value and depend upon design and project management.

Those are two key things that can be beneficial that you might want to look for in any community that you consider.

My list would include:

1. Is the construction/renovation market limited by the local economy?

2. Is there inherent reasons for design and/or project magement to be valued?

3. Is there growth and potential for more growth?

4. How saturated is the current market for LAs or other people providing similar services?

5. Is there any opportunity for you as an employee?

6. Are you capable of making a living or supplementing an income by freelancing?

Construction/revitalization/renovation can function without landscape architects. Just because there is growth does not mean that we are valued. You have to dig around to determine whether or not there are a lot of indicators that the market values (willingly and wantingly pays for) what you do. You can’t just go on the premise that we should be valued, but whether we actually are valued.

Where I live, there are a ton of design/build landscape contractors that most local homeowners defer to for design. Fortunately, some value design more than others and some work can be had for an LD or LA. Boston/Cambridge LA firms now work this market pretty hard as well. Local LAs and LDs are either very small or one person offices, so there is not much in the way of employment opportunity (I know, I’ve been trying to get a good LA job here for since ’98).

The other personal experience that I have had here is that you can’t just hand a shingle and get a web page and expect to get any work. It takes a while to build a network and local knowledge to even sound like you know what you are doing. I have to believe that would be the same no matter where you go.

The biggest question that I’d have is are you looking for a specific opportunity to settle for a career or a place to advance until those other opportunities come up?

I believe that the longer you stay in one place, the bigger your network grows, and the more solid a foundation you are building to get to do what you want to do as long as that opportunity exists where you are. I’m guessing that Moscow does not have that now and is unlikely to have it in the future. Go to where it is and build your way up to take that opportunity whether it is a direct route or you come in sideways. You are going to need patience and persistence.

I design subdivisions, master planned communities, and town centers in Houston, which is my dream job.  Things are booming down here, far more so than my native Chicagoland.  Houston is the fourth largest city in the county, and likely the third after the recent census.  I will admit we have a very long way to go, and there is still a very obvious lack of open space systems.  Comparing Houston to North Dakota is comparing apples to galoshes.