Architects and other design professionals face complex questions about overlapping and incidental practice every day, often with limited precedent to help address them. The Interorganizational Council on Regulation (ICOR)—made up of the Council for Interior Design Qualification (CIDQ), the Council of Landscape Architectural Registration Boards (CLARB), the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES), and NCARB—has released new guidance to help licensing boards and practitioners navigate these situations in a more consistent, transparent, and defensible way.
How It Was Developed
Starting in 2022, ICOR launched the Practice Overlap Initiative Task Force—the first coordinated, multi-profession effort to explore the areas where the scopes of architecture, engineering, interior design, landscape architecture, and surveying intersect. Led by a steering committee and informed by dozens of subject matter experts, the task force analyzed licensure and certification standards across all five professions—including definitions of practice, as well as education, experience, and examination requirements.
Why It Matters
Incidental practice, overlapping practice, and scope of practice have posed challenges for licensing boards to regulate, code officials to review and approve building plans, and practitioners to ethically navigate. To protect the public, licensing boards are responsible for ensuring that only competent individuals are practicing in each of these professions. Licensing boards often look to their national regulatory associations to offer uniform standards, definitions, and best practices to address such challenges. However, up until now, no national guidance has existed for overlapping practice among the regulatory organizations.
How to Use It
The goal of this resource is to give licensing boards and practitioners a shared framework for navigating scope overlap questions with greater consistency and confidence. Licensing boards can use the Practice Overlap Guidance as a reference for evaluating practice complaints; to inform updates to statutes and policies; and to educate new staff about the distinctions and commonalities among the regulated professions. That said, the guidance is not a legal mandate or a tool for expanding existing scope of practice—rather, it is a first-of-its-kind, cross-profession guidance grounded in the current national uniform licensing standards for architects, engineers, interior designers, landscape architects, and land surveyors.
Design professionals, on the other hand, can use the guidance to better understand the overlaps and distinctions with their colleagues in other design professions, verify they are practicing within their expertise, and articulate how their work may integrate with other design professions.
As practice, technology, and regulatory expectations continue to evolve, ICOR will refine and strengthen the guidance over time based on real-world use and stakeholder feedback. Download the new ICOR Guidance to learn more.
