2023

The members of the Interorganizational Council on Regulation (ICOR) are partnering to develop guidance on how to best regulate overlapping practice between the professions of architecture, engineering, interior design, landscape architecture and surveying.

No matter the name—incidental practice, overlapping practice, scope of practice—this concept has posed challenges for architect, engineer and surveyor, interior designer, and landscape architect 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 only competent individuals are practicing in each of these professions.

Jurisdictions often look to their regulatory associations to offer uniform standards, definitions, and best practices to address such challenges. However, no such national guidance currently exists for overlapping practice among the regulatory organizations. To help address this gap in knowledge, ICOR has been actively working together to fully explore this long-standing issue.

The goal of the ICOR Practice Overlap Task Force is to develop uniform guidelines and definitions for competent overlap of practice that can be adopted as the recommended definitions in model law and national guidance issued by the ICOR organizations.  By conducting research and taking a broad view of almost a hundred discrete design topics, ICOR is developing clear and shared definitions, guidelines, and best practices that professional licensing authorities and building officials can use to better regulate practice overlap. 

These efforts are being directed by a steering committee comprised of licensed professionals, member board executives/administrators, and public members, supported by staff and consultants.  Their work is being informed by the research and conversations of subcommittees made up of dozens of expert volunteers who practice architecture, interior design, engineering, landscape architecture, and land surveying. Together these groups represent diverse perspectives across regions of the country, practice domains, and small and large firms.

The output of this work will be clear areas of the design process where overlap is appropriate because professionals are competent to practice in that area and a delineation of where there is distinction between appropriate scopes of practice. 

The task force has made significant progress over the first year of its effort.  The goals for 2024 include drafting model language and sharing information about the process and initial products with licensing board members, as well as seeking feedback about what an ultimate solution would need to look like to be most useful.  By 2025, ICOR hopes to be in a position to finalize this work and put a proposal before each of our memberships to vote on that would update our national models.   

ICOR will continue to provide regular updates to licensing boards and external partners as this initiative progresses.

ABOUT ICOR

The Interorganizational Council on Regulation (ICOR) is made up of the Council of Interior Design Qualification (CIDQ), Council of Landscape Architectural Registration Boards (CLARB), National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) and National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES).  The organizations within ICOR collaborate on issues of shared interest including member board support, best practices in regulation and advocating on behalf of the public protection role our member licensing boards play. ICOR also works together to harmonize policies, processes and procedures between professions to reduce friction and create administrative efficiencies for the many boards shared by the ICOR associations