ICOR’s members are partnering to develop guidance for our professional licensing boards on how to best regulate overlapping practice between the professions of architecture, engineering, interior design, landscape architecture, and surveying.

Referred to by a variety of names—incidental practice, overlapping practice, scope of practice—this concept has posed challenges for both licensing boards to regulate and for practitioners to 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 guidance currently exists for overlapping practice among the regulatory organizations. To help address this gap in knowledge, ICOR is working together to explore this concept and develop model regulatory language and other guidance documents that can be used by licensing boards to govern areas of practice overlap.

ICOR member professions share common licensure elements as well as performing some of the same tasks. While this ‘practice overlap’ does exist, it is important to note each of these professions are unique and distinct, with a role in protecting the health, safety, and welfare of the public. It is common to see these professions regulated by a multi-disciplinary board, as well as having these separate professions working on the same design project. That collaboration is vital to the design process and does not diminish the individual impact that each profession has on protecting the public. 

Architecture, engineering, interior design, landscape architecture, and surveying professions intersect when working on buildings, the environments surrounding buildings, transportation corridors, and our nation’s infrastructure. ICOR-related professions are involved in the construction process, planning, designs, drawings, and stamping and of sealing documents, essential to obtaining building permits and other necessary approvals for construction. 

Collaboration between licensed professionals is essential to collectively protect the health, safety, and welfare of the public. A featured example are hospitals. Hospitals are complex buildings comprised of many departments that provide the myriad services necessary for successful health outcomes. It is essential that qualified design professionals work together in creating safe environments that protect the health, safety, and welfare of patients, healthcare providers, and visitors occupying these buildings. With the increased presence of life threatening, highly communicable viruses, the importance of safe, well-designed healthcare facilities has never been more important. 

Practice Overlap Task Force
Building on work conducted by NCARB’s Incidental Practice Task Force, ICOR has created a joint Practice Overlap Task Force. The main charges of this group are to:

• Develop a uniform guideline and definition for competent overlap of practice
• Seek organizational commitments to adopt the recommendations into our national models and policies​

The task force includes an overarching steering committee composed of members of each profession, as well as subcommittees for each design profession. The task force anticipates sharing a first draft of its recommended language in spring 2024, at which point each ICOR member organization will solicit feedback from its membership before the uniform guidelines are finalized.