Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a senior architectural designer and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.

A Senior Architectural Designer is responsible for overseeing the designing of such projects like urban landscapes, buildings, and parks. This position is required to meet with the client and discuss the budget as well as preferences and negotiate with the landscape consultant to learn the construction site and create various concepts for the project for availability to the client.

Other important tasks for this position includes creating designers that work within the customer's budget, providing drawings to the construction team and monitoring progress to make sure it is faithful to the design, inspecting the building to ensure it meets the client's standards, compiling the required data and performing dimensional and routinely calculations that are necessary for the preparation of drawings and design layouts, ensuring compliance with the required codes and standards,

Core Skills Required to be a Senior Architectural Designer

Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.

Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.

A senior architectural designer should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.

Listening Skills:

Listening Skills are a practical ability to accurately receive and interpret messages you receive during the communication process to ensure flow and accuracy are maintained.

A Senior Architectural Designer ought to have outstanding listening skills that lead to a better understanding at the workplace between the management and the staff, customer satisfaction in return yielding greater productivity with fewer mistakes and increased sharing of information in a more creative and innovative way.

Innovation:

Innovation is the process of translating new invention into a service that creates value or brings better solutions that meet the requirements.

A Senior Architectural Designer ought to introduce innovation in their business to help save time and money giving a competitive advantage to grow and adapt the business in today's marketplace as well as creating more efficient processes and ideas with a likelihood for your business to succeed.

Facilitation:

Facilitation is making tasks or life easy for others while ensuring the daily running of successful meetings or workshops or business at large.

A Senior Architectural Designer must use facilitation to process and structure a system that meets the needs of either an individual or a team to help them achieve their goals as well as add value to their lives by making sure each participates.

Decision Making:

Decision Making is the art of making choices by identifying a decision, gathering information and assessing alternative resolutions before settling on one.

A Senior Architectural Designer cannot afford to make poor decisions, that's why he ought to develop a systematic approach to decision making that allows him to make every decision with skill, confidence, and wisdom producing a final choice of competence in the workplace.

Equal Opportunity and Diversity:

Equal Opportunity and Diversity means having employees from a wide range of background that includes different ages, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious belief, educational background, physical ability and treating them equally.

A Senior Architectural Designer is required by the law to create a workplace free from discrimination and harassment to its employees as well as understand and adhere to the rights and responsibilities under the human rights and antidiscrimination law.

Enthusiasm:

Enthusiasm is an intense enjoyment or a lively interest in a certain thing with a zest and a strong belief that can be felt by those around you.

A Senior Architectural Designer ought to be enthusiastic as well as create a friendly atmosphere that makes the staff comfortable with the surroundings, with the other employees to create a less passive working place.

Practical Thinking:

Practical Thinking is the skill to think creatively about projects or work that requires your full attention to be completed and to bring great results.

A Senior Architectural Designer must ensure the decisions he makes are well sought after using professional characteristics for employees with high-level responsibilities to feel included and to allow growth for everyone in a constantly changing world that requires creativity.

Role Awareness:

Role Awareness is the ability to be informed of your role in a given environment as well as understand the expectations placed on a position and to see how they are met apparently.

A Senior Architectural Designer must assess, measure and quantify his employee's awareness of their roles to see if they are transparent about what is required of each of them and review what kind of results they are delivering from their understanding.

Project Management:

Project Management is structuring a to-do list for your project or company containing tasks and responsibilities as well as creating a roadmap for the execution of those duties promptly.

A Senior Architectural Designer must place emphasis on the application of the project management methodologies and principles by the staff in the daily functions and responsibilities to foster efficiently as well as create a competitive advantage in the heavily competitive business space.

Business Trend Awareness:

Business Trend Awareness is the capacity to be conscious of the changing ways in which the companies are developing in the marketplace.

A Senior Architectural Designer should have the required knowledge of new business trends that he can instigate or follow and the understanding of how they are impacting the business decisions which will eventually bring success to the employees as well as the enterprise

Hard Skills Required to be a Senior Architectural Designer

Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.

Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.

A senior architectural designer should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.

Senior Architectural Designer: Hard skills list

Abstraction
Analysis
Architectural Codes
Architectural Rendering
AutoCAD
Budgeting
Building Codes
Building Construction
Building Systems
Calculations
Client Relations
Collaboration
Communication
Computer Aided Design (CAD)
Computer Processing
Conceptualization
Construction Administration
Construction Documents
Critical Assessment
Design
Design Concepts
Design to Delivery
Development
Documents
Drafting
Drawing
Estimating
Finance
Industrial Design
Innovation
Installation
Integration
Interpersonal
Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED)
Legal
Management
Mathematics
Model Making
New Construction
Planning
Production
Project Management
Rehabilitation
Renovation
Research
Residential
Retail
Revit
Sawing
Scheduling
Seeing Big Picture Results
Slicing
Software
Solving Complex Problems
Sustainable Design
Specifications
Technical Vision
Visualize
Writing
Zoning Codes

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