Closing The Technology Architect Gap Starts With Building A Mentor Pipeline
Architecture & Governance Magazine, Tuesday, August 25th, 2026
The US faces a severe shortage of technology architects, and the bottleneck is a lack of mentors, not students.
Paul Preiss of Iasa Global argues the US needs roughly 750,000 technology architects but has only about 179,200 computer network architects, far fewer per capita than accountants or building architects.
He notes training 50,000 architects annually for 20 years would require 40,000-60,000 distinguished-level mentors, arguing 'the rate limit on this profession is mentors, not students.'
Developing board-certified architects takes 5-8 years, and distinguished-level architects 8-10+ years, paralleling medical education; he argues technology needs the same structured accountability as medicine, law, and engineering.