Spatial Career Guide

Hi Justin,

This should be a fun set of posts! Four thoughts:

1) Work is underway on a core curriculum for 2-year post-secondary schools at the GeoTech Center
2) You mention the divisions in (academic) geography being too wide and the wheels turning too slow. This is true, but for good reason. Major institutions like Universities shouldn’t be blowing in the wind…they should be a lot like turning a battleship – slow and deliberate. Having said that, I would suggest that getting agreement from geospatial professionals in business about what is critical and what is not from a degree program is just as difficult.
3) A university education should not be focused on job training. As a student, if you are spending your time in college focused on what job you want when you’re done, you’re doing it wrong. Having said that, I firmly believe that Universities do a disservice to their students if they ignore market and technology trends in curriculum and methods. But it’s a fine line that must be re-examined all the time.
4) One more career track – GIS Manager

Thanks for putting the post together and I look forward to reading the responses and the follow-ups.

This is really interesting post for me. Thanks Justin for your insights and Michael for your constructive criticism. I would like to add few more abstractions I have been analyzing since i start my graduate study last year. Its all about this technology and how instructional paradigm, and industries are thriving to achieve the common goals but in vagueness and disparities.
First all let me illustrate my findings.
1. GIScience is predominantly taught in the academic environment as a course in Geography after the inception of the word by Dr. Goodchild in 90’s. Although GIScience itself is growing and geospatial technologies promotes these technologies to solve multidisciplinary problems, GI Science is still evolving and developing. Most european countries and very few American schools use the word geo-informatics that addresses the problem domain far better than most universities.
2. As Justin said, Geography is vague..seamlessly vague, typically they teach GI Science courses like Remote Sensing,GIS,Cartography,Visualization etc, Water resources courses like Hydrology,Policy etc., Climatology courses, Organic Food, Human Geography, Natural Hazards,Sustainable Development etc. ..that makes the Geography and its inherently interdisciplinary. This is the strength and weakness for GI Science. Everything occurs in Geography.
3.The students who are in Geography department and who likes to take courses in GIS have two different objectives, one who just needs an application of GIS technology for the spatial analysis of their problem domain; literally every academic department enjoys the spatial analysis and geostatistics and others who loves to explores advances of GI science and are looking forward to be Geo-spatial professionals.
4.Although the Applied Geography and Spatial Analysis have been in the academia since early 50’s, there has not been substantial development in this academic discipline because most geographers have little computing knowledge. With the advent of computing and availability of computer resources, Geographers are in the dilemma of opportunities and challenges that existed in the edges of swords.
5. Interestingly , Spatial data is considered as one of the largest data sets that needs thorough understanding of high power computing knowledge and analysis. Geographic problems are computationally intensive. This emphasize the geographers to cross the boundaries and move towards the computation.
6. Undergrad and grad students in geography realize the bottleneck of the technologies they are pursuing in the department when they are about to graduate, most jobs expects the students to have programming knowledge. Although , they are using one of the most sophisticated software like ArcDesktop or ERDAS IMAGINE but they lack the basic programming ,design and database skills.
7.Although ESRI and ERDAS products are defacto standards in the teaching paradigm at US universities in Geography department, with the rapid deployment of the new versions of these software, instructors and students are finding difficult to cope with challenges underlying with the advances in the computer science and industries.
8.Interestingly, although the employers knows that they cant get the peoples with both of these backgrounds (GI Science and Computer Science), I doubt how these vacancies are filled up!! and not surprisingly if anyone has both of these skills, he would love to go for generic IT service providers rather that geospatial industry. Even ,if we see the hiring salary, IT easily surpasses geospatial industry.

Now with the change in computing paradigm and development in Geo-spatial industries, I think we need to add following career Tracks.
ofcourse GIS Manager
GIS co-ordinater
Geovisualization and Analytics
GIS Planner
GIS cloud Engineer
GIS System Administrator

Well, with the changes in the computing paradigm in the recent years, its very likely that the geospatial industry will move towards cloud computing environment. if that’s the case, what would be the impact ? Hopefully the funda’s and conceptual aspect of GI science will remain unchanged.

And lastly, no-matter how things are moving in academic, Geo-spatial industry would continue to grown in the coming years with the advent of location based services, GPS , and satellite imageries, the prospects of GI professions looks better than ever.

However, being a graduate student double majoring in GI science and Computer Science, I can peep problems through both of my eyes yet i feel like programming would not only be the basic tools for GI science people but for every academic discipline and obviously, the Geography department should be focusing more on computational courses and students should take the courses in computer science departments.

Hi Justin,
It has been so helpful to read through some of your blog posts/discussions, so thanks for taking the time to write them! I am at a turning point in my life, in that I am seeking to change careers, or rather return to GIS after quite some time away and very little experience in it to begin with. I graduated with a BA in Geography back in 2006 & immediately started working as a GIS Technical Aide for a year at a city. For the most part, I was assigned to storm drain & wastewater maintenance & updates as a result of the city’s acquisition of county land. I also completed short-term projects with the utility, planning, & public safety departments. I loved the job (it has been my favorite as of yet because of the work climate & work/life balance), but I didn’t feel like the technology/computer science aspect of it came naturally to me which was discouraging & led me to pursue other passions a year later. Since leaving the field, I traveled extensively and have worked in education (preschool, TEFL, or Teaching English as a Foreign Language, and most recently, special education). While I love teaching, the specialties I have experience in do not offer the best work/life balance amongst other issues, which is why I have decided to change careers. Since leaving the GIS field, I am completely out of the loop. Yesterday, I registered for the free trial version of ArcMap Pro and I had no clue what I was doing; it was embarrassing! I am somewhat familiar & remember some of the terms being thrown around, but not nearly enough to make myself useful in the application of GIS today. I have thought about enrolling in computer programming & GIS classes to test the waters again. My thoughts were to take Python, SQL, Adobe, & Intro. to GIS since it’s been so long that I last took that Intro. class back in 2005! I am apprehensive about taking a programming course because I feel as though I am not as computer savvy as others. I am good with language though, and can speak a second language; crossing my fingers & toes that that would serve me well to learn a programming “language”. I would love to utilize GIS in a position similar to the one I was previously in with the city (utilities & public safety), while eventually taking on more responsibility and challenging, meaningful work. I recently did some research on job openings, using different titles besides GIS, since that is just a supplementary skill for many positions. It seems there are very few openings across the nation, compared to when I was looking back in 2006. Also, it appears that most of the positions require extensive experience. Has there been a decline in jobs requiring the use of GIS? Is there a saturation of GIS-trained professionals? What would you suggest to someone considering re-entering the GIS field after quite some time away? I would appreciate any insight you have to offer. Thanks so much!

I think this set of posts has promise to be very interesting and useful. I would like to provide one other thought regarding potential career paths in geo-spatial. Geo-spatial consulting is a very important career path with the ever changing use of technology in this field. Not to mention the willingness to use geo-spatial technologies in sectors that previously wouldn’t have considered this approach. Granted consulting is typically a path taken after some experience is attained, however, it is good for those considering a career in geo-spatial to be aware of this potential path.

Anyway, just my 2 cents. I look forward to reading the upcoming posts.

Spatial Career Guide

Justin

29 Comments

Leave a Reply Cancel reply