As a practice we receive many emails from all around the world inquiring about architecture jobs in London.
This seems to be a very common query and I would like to go through a few suggestions that may be helpful in finding an architectural job in the London area.
Your portfolio
My first suggestion is to be extremely critical about your own project portfolio. Ultimately, we are Architects and we are drawn to strong projects and images. You should never forget that you are as good as your worst project and therefore try to give priority to quality over quantity. You need to be ruthless in your project selection, which can be hard given the attachment that we all have to our projects. Try to look at your portfolio from an outsider’s point of view. How strong is your project? Have you conveyed its quality?
Another important point is to make sure that it is clear what role you had on a specific project. There is no point in sharing several drawings if they were produced and coordinated by someone else.
No matter how good your profile is, nobody will ever spend much time going through your entire life’s history and therefore any application needs to be a ruthless summary of the best work you have carried out.
I like portfolios to be relatively short up to 10 A4 pages and with a simple design.
Hard copy vs email
If there is a quick way to stand out of the crowd it is certainly to send a hard copy of your documents. I appreciate this is not very straightforward, it is certainly much easier to send an email, however it shows the practice that you have gone the extra mile. Sending documents by post can also be quite expensive when you consider printing costs and shipping costs. However, you must keep in mind at 99% of the applications we receive are sent via email and they often get mixed with suppliers’ emails and sometimes spam and a printed application will have more weight than an email.
Sending a physical copy of your portfolio guarantees that whoever receives the document will pay attention, plus a physical document is much easier to read than an email.
In order to avoid spending enormous amounts of money I would suggest making a shortlist of the offices that you prefer and limit the shipment of hard copies to this list.
The Curriculum Vitae
Every application should come with a Curriculum Vitae that should support the work shown in the portfolio.
Again, I think the Curriculum Vitae should be relatively simple, probably two A4 pages, with a graphic design that feels consistent with the rest of the portfolio.
The cover letter
The application should also come with a cover letter that should be completely bespoke to the office you are targeting.
The cover letter should explain why you are applying to that specific office and what you've done in the past that relates to the type of projects undertaken by that office. In other words, you must explain why you would be a good match for that practice.
Finally, we tend to ignore all applications that do not present a London address, and this is even more important after Brexit. I strongly suggest sorting out any visa requirements before applying for a job as it is highly unlikely that an architectural office will have the ability to provide any visa support given the relatively small size of most practices.
Iacopo