Definition of Professional Planning Experience

The following criteria define professional planning experience in the work of an individual applicant. While the criteria are more likely to be met in an agency (private or government), institute, or firm engaged in comprehensive planning, instruction, or research, this is not a prerequisite.

• Applicants offering experience in more narrowly focused places of work should take particular care in showing how that experience meets the four criteria.

• Applicants must demonstrate how their work as a professional planner was related to the four criteria.

Professional Planning Experience

Professional planning experience, whether acquired through practice, teaching or research, must address all four of the following criteria (a faculty member with a planning degree teaching in a planning program with at least five (5) years experience, qualifies as meeting the definition of professional planning experience):

1. Influencing public decision making in the public interest.
   Recommending specific actions or choices to elected/appointed officials, private sector representatives, or others regarding public decisions concerned with social, economic, or physical change in the public interest.
2. Employing an appropriately comprehensive point of view.
   Appropriate comprehensiveness requires: (1) looking at the consequences (e.g., physical/environmental, social, economic/financial, governmental) of making a proposed decision; (2) conforming a proposed decision to the larger context in which it will occur; and (3) treating multiple policies, actions, or systems simultaneously when interlinkages are too great to treat separately. It does not require looking at everything at once if the above three criteria are met with a proposal, plan, or program of narrower scope.
3. Applying a planning process appropriate to the situation.
   This means a process which is appropriate to its place and situation in: (1) the number and order of its steps (e.g., problem/opportunity definition, goal setting, generating alternate strategies, strategy choice, implementation, evaluation), (2) its orientation to the future, to value change, and to resource constraints; (3) its quality of research and analysis; and (4) its format of policy, program, or plan proposal.
4. Involving a professional level of responsibility and resourcefulness.
   This means initiative, judgment, substantial involvement, and personal accountability for defining and preparing significant substantive elements of planning activities.

To qualify as professional planning experience, the work must meet all of the above criteria.

Full Time and Part Time Experience

Persons engaged in part-time professional planning experience may prorate that experience into a full-time equivalent. Persons working full time, but devoting a portion of their time to another field, may prorate their professional planning experience into a full-time equivalent.

Not Generally Considered Professional Experience

1. Work in related fields, unless it constitutes a minor element of the applicant's planning experience. The following illustrates types of work in related fields sometimes performed by planners, but more often by other professionals:
   • Subdivision design
   • Large scale housing or site design work
   • Traffic engineering or highway design
   • Land surveying or mapping
   • Community organization
   • Social work
     
     
2. Experience in related professions (e.g., law, architecture, landscape architecture, engineering).
3. Market research or analysis, and other types of physical and social science research normally performed by other professionals or academic disciplines.
4. Work at a pre-professional level. Although there is often a fine line between professional experience and pre-professional experience, the latter generally involves less personal responsibility and less substantive technical accomplishments along the lines of the above four criteria that define professional planning experience.
5. Elected and appointed officials: While contributions by members of city councils, boards of commissioners, planning commissions, boards of zoning appeals, and citizen advisory boards are indeed invaluable to the advancement of planning, service on such a body, by itself, does not constitute professional planning experience.