Gaining your Passivhaus Designer qualification is a great achievement but, being mostly theory based, may not be enough to prepare you for the practicalities and responsibilities of designing to the exacting Passivhaus standard.

Passivhaus Preceptorship bridges the gap between qualification and practice so you become a confident, competent Passivhaus practitioner.

Gaining confidence and competence in Passivhaus design

As a newly qualified practitioner, getting to grips with every aspect of Passivhaus design can be challenging.

Design decisions influence and impact other decisions, and all impact the building’s energy use, the comfort of occupants and its performance against Passivhaus criteria.

It may seem unnerving that the crucial design tool is an Excel spreadsheet! The Passivhaus Planning Package (PHPP) is a design tool and, ultimately, to complete a certified Passivhaus, a PHPP matching the as-built building must be completed and signed off by a Passivhaus Certifier.

Understanding how PHPP works is vital to successfully designing a Passivhaus, but getting started and gaining confidence with it can be challenging for newly qualified Passivhaus Designers or those working on their first projects.

What does preceptorship mean?

It’s a great question! We came across it when developing our ideas, and it perfectly captures what we’re aiming to help you with:

Preceptorship is structured professional support and guidance for newly qualified practitioners to develop confidence and skills.

It involves support from an experienced colleague, a ‘preceptor’, helping bridge the gap between student learning and autonomous professional practice.

We focus on:

• Skills Development:

  Translating what you’ve learnt in your Passivhaus training into practical skills in a real project setting

• Building Confidence and Competence:

  Preceptorship’s primary aim is to help build your confidence and competence as a Passivhaus practitioner

• Continuous learning and professional development:

  Our content lays the foundation for ongoing learning and continuing professional development, and you can raise technical questions and suggest topics for future articles by subscribing and joining our community chats.

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How does Passivhaus Preceptorship work?

Passivhaus Preceptorship breaks down each aspect of Passivhaus design and decision-making into five easy-to-navigate areas bridging the gap between qualification and practice, by guiding and mentoring you, step-by-step, through your first Passivhaus projects.

We’re building a growing library of resources that explain how to get started with the practicalities of Passivhaus design.

From standard operating procedures for all parts of PHPP, through vital area markups and confusing M&E systems, to niche inputs where they’ve cropped up on live projects, we will cover everything you need to grow your confidence and successfully model and build your first Passivhaus projects.

We'll always try to follow our ‘why, what, when, how, where’ format, to keep concise, information-rich articles coming to your inbox.

Keep up to date with all our latest posts by subscribing and have a peruse of all the posts in our archive:

Passivhaus Preceptorship posts

I drew this chart recently, partly as a challenge to my complete-novice Python skills (thanks for the coding support ChatGPT!), and also to describe a general uneasiness I’ve discussed with many others about the conflict between the euphoria of completing the very challenging Passivhaus Designer training course (nice, shiny certificate) with the cold-light-of-day realisation of knowing very little about the practicalities of putting that new-found knowledge into practice.

Where are you on your Passivhaus learning journey? Interested novice, newly certified designer, working on your first project, experienced practitioner?

Yay, I passed the Passivhaus exam!

Successfully completing the course feels very much like the ‘I am a Passivhaus genius’ stage, until you get to your desk, open PHPP, and have that realisation of not being quite sure where to start.

Luckily for me I was working in a consultancy (Beyond Carbon) specialising in Passivhaus design when I did the training. I’d also previously studied the Passivhaus design approach, PHPP and designPH in my master’s degree, and had nearly a year working on Passivhaus projects at Beyond Carbon prior to taking the training course, but it was still a big learning curve. On passing, I also had at least a dozen colleagues also working on Passivhaus projects, many of whom have years of experience and could mentor and support me as I continued my Passivhaus consultant’s journey.

But that might not be the case for you!

Oh, there is more to this than I thought

Are you the only Passivhaus designer in an architectural practice or engineering consultancy, or a freelancer specialising in sustainable buildings who wants to add a Passivhaus string to your bow?

Who’s going to mentor you? How are you going to gain enough experience to become a competent designer with the expertise needed to deliver high-quality Passivhaus outcomes (something that’s distinctly important to the successful delivery of this very challenging building standard)?

There are a myriad of subjects taught as part of the Passivhaus training course: understanding building physics, U-value calculations, the basics of PHPP, optimising form factor for energy use, reduction of overheating, considerations for M&E design (the list of essentials goes on), but it’s still really hard to spring straight from the shiny certificate stage into your first project, putting you squarely in the ‘Oh, there is more to this than I thought’ point on the chart!

It’s a challenge to realise that the confidence you had following completion of the course doesn’t necessarily translate into being able to competently undertake the Passivhaus Designer role - and especially to support and challenge other members of the design team - as you’re still on your own learning journey.

I may never understand this

The deeper you go into the course training manuals, the PHPP manual, Passipedia (and many other excellent resources), the more you realise you’ve only just learnt to swim and there's numerous ways to drown in the complexities!

You need some support from experienced practitioners, you need to get onsite to see things in real life, you need to understand best-practice, rules of thumb and the little things you add into PHPP to make it work.

But, as Donald Rumsfeld famously said, there are unknown unknowns (or known unknowns at best), confidence diminishes and you find yourself in what the original Dunning-Kruger curve calls the Valley of Despair, at the bottom of the learning curve.

It’s finally starting to make some sense

Competence is a familiar term in the construction industry, so I hope we’re not offending you by suggesting you lack competence as a newly qualified Passivhaus Designer!

Although no competent persons scheme currently exists for Passivhaus practitioners, the idea of competence is understood to mean ‘someone with the necessary skills, knowledge, experience and other qualities… to self-certify work’. This formally applies in construction to the self-certification of projects to Building Regulations, but can equally apply to the experience, skills and knowledge needed to successfully deliver high-quality Passivhaus buildings.

As you work on your first projects, understand best practice, get the support and mentoring you need and learn the tips and tricks of the trade, you move along your Passivhaus learning journey, competence increases and confidence grows 🙌

That’s what Passivhaus Preceptorship offers you: bridging the gap between qualification and practice by guiding and mentoring you, step-by-step, through your first Passivhaus projects.

Read more about how Passivhaus Preceptorship works in our ‘Start Here…’ article.

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