035: How to Get Your First Architecture Job (Without Any Experience) – With Architects Sarah Lebner & Warwick Mihaly

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How to Get Your First Architecture Job After Graduating (Without Any Experience)

As part of Sarah Lebner’s book launch event, an anonymous question we received was . . .

“How can I get a job as an architect after graduating my masters, without any previous work experience in the industry?”

This is a snippet taken from the 2-hour event on Sarah’s youtube channel (https://youtu.be/nOtKyvSTNgk) where Sarah Lebner of Light House Architecture and Science, Warwick Mihaly of Mihaly Slocombe and myself, Kyle Sinko, answer this question along with 40+ other questions asked anonymously by young architects and students.

I found Sarah and Warwick’s responses extremely useful and wanted to share it with any students struggling to find a job in architecture after graduating.

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How to Get Your First Architecture Job After Graduating (Without Any Experience) Transcript

S:

As someone who has a Master’s graduate that has no work experience, do you have any suggestions on how to land your first job?

 

K:

What is going on Archi Students? My name is Kyle. Welcome to the show. This is Episode 35 of the successful Archi students podcast and you might be wondering why I’m wearing a beanie. It’s because it’s frickin cold here also because I had a mark on my head. I don’t really want to talk about as walked into the kitchen cupboard door. Anyways, today I’ve got some good content for you. This is a snippet or a clip from the event with Sarah Lebner and Warwick Mihaly from Mihaly Slocombe architects based in Melbourne and Sarah is based in Canberra.

This was an event for Sarah’s book launch 101 things I didn’t learn in architecture school but wish I had known. The links in the description as well if you want to check it out. Now, I was going back over the content from this event and I was just looking over and I was like it’s really gonna be helpful for my audience. So I thought I really wanted to share their responses with you guys and I think you guys You’re really gonna enjoy this because they’re both practicing architects. Lori’s running his own firm, whereas Sarah is the principal architect of lighthouse architecture and science. So I think they’ve got some good knowledge behind them. And then I’ve got my own little tip there at the end, which is not quite as important to listen to, but um, definitely stick around for that, because it’s a good tip, which you might have already heard in this. In this intro, what am I trying to say? Yeah, it’ll make sense later, I’m sure anyways, if you guys did happen to miss that event, it was a two hour event. It was a live event for the book launch. And it has over I think we answered over 40 questions, which you guys submitted. So you definitely gotta check out that event on YouTube over on Sarah’s channel. The link is also in the description. So without further ado, let’s get into the clip.

 

S:

Someone who is a Master’s graduate but has no work experience. Do you have any suggestions on how to land your first job, I would say just apply. It’s not it’s not necessary to have experience. If you check out, there’s a free job seeker workbook on our website, that that covers a lot of these things in those I stress that employers are usually looking for inherent, soft skills and the right personality and potential, possibly even more than relevant work experience. Would you agree with that work?

 

W:

Yeah. So the number one factor that influences who we eventually employs, this is not who we interview, people get an interview, because their application is great, and their portfolio is great. So that means when you’re sitting down for the interview, you’re already competing against other people who do great work that gets you in the door. The person who gets employed is the person who feels like they’re going to be the best cultural fit, you know, basically, am I going to like working next to this person? five days a week, for a whole bunch of years? If the answer is yes, then get the job from the other side of that relationship. The first thing you can do is to treat your potential boss like a person which means no decision. There’s no matter means no like generic applications trying to understand who you’re applying to, and why you want to work there and why they might want to have you working there. Because that is those are the decision making matrices that the person sitting on the other side of the table is is going to be going through.

 

S:

Yeah, nice. Anything to add Kyle?

 

K:

No, I think that was very well said. I think if I could add one thing would be go read Sarah’s book because that’s what helped me understand all that. So I’m gonna plug that URL right there. What do you reckon? Pretty cool. Hey, if you guys enjoyed that video, please make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel, please leave a like and a comment and go check out Sarah’s book 101 things I didn’t learn in architecture school. And that’s about it for me. I’ll see you guys in the next video.

Resources Mentioned

Sarah’s website: https://www.myfirstarchitecturejob.com/

Sarah’s free jobseeker workbook: https://www.myfirstarchitecturejob.com/free-workbook

Sarah’s book “101 Things I Didn’t Learn in Architecture School (and Wish I Had Known)”: https://amzn.to/35qEuvB

Warwick’s architecture blog: https://panfilo.co/

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