Hiii dear,

There are courses you can take in UML and architectural thinking. You can not start out as an architect - do another IT discipline first and when you are able to see the big picture, change to architecture if you like communicating a lot with others.



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If you work for a large company, they may have a defined software architect career path, often with a suggested set of courses to take and an indication of what experience is relevant. IBM does this.

Note that software architect is not an entry level profession; you have to have done some other IT related work first and been able to see the relations between components other than your own.

As you become more successful in software architecture, you will, as Tom Scott says, code less and less and draw many more diagrams. A good portion of software architecture is not just designing a solution but communicating / selling / explaining your design to the stake holders of the project. Diagrams and pictures are a concise way of representing information and software architects use a lot of them.

There are standards you can learn (UML)and frameworks (TOGAF, DODAF) to provide a common technical vocabulary when communicating with other architects and no shortage of books on IT architecture, both in paper and online. IBM has a nice series of redbooks and some good tooling for doing architecture (e.g. Rational Software Architect).



It's not that programming is not allowed. The better architects I know see a project from conception to go-live implementation and often the architect will write small scripts to help out testing. But an architect will rarely have the time to do real programming; they'll be doing architecture and ensuring that the customer and developers stay aligned with the architectural vision.

Thanks for contacting Careers 360.

Hope this would be helpful to you.