Like many of you, we on the Esri education team continually give presentations and workshops on the topic of GIS as a career. A number of recurring themes resonate with students, educators, career counselors, administrators, and policymakers, and my attempt at encapsulating the most important of these themes is below.
• Do you want a career or just a job? Do you want to be paid for doing something you love to do or just collect a paycheck? A career where GIS is a fundamental part of your day allows you to be immersed in a field where you can continually grow and move forward in an environment of lifelong learning.
• Do you want to do something cool? GIS is an exciting, rapidly-changing, and cool technology that merges nicely with many other technologies that students may be interested in, such as video, web development, phone apps, and much more.
• Do you want to do something important? GIS is a green technology that is making a difference to our planet and its people every day for key decisions about wildlife habitat, human health, renewable energy, climate change, water quality and availability, wilderness areas, and much more.
• Do you love maps? For thousands of years, maps have been fascinating and powerful sources of information. GIS combines the best of visualization and technology. Today’s maps are not just reference sources, they are dynamic, and you can change them to suit whatever need you have or problem you are trying to solve.
• Do you like to get outside? GIS depends on data collected in the field. Your “field” could be atop a glacier, in a river, on a city street. There is no end to what needs to be mapped and analyzed.
• Do you want to empower people? The convergence of the web, GIS, and handheld devices make citizen science a reality—you can contribute to real scientific studies or build tools to enable citizens to make these contributions.
• Are you curious about your world? GIS allows you to investigate “what if” scenarios, to model, to ask questions, and to investigate possible outcomes.
• Do you care about the well-being of your local community? A career in GIS enables you to do something about issues in your own community, such as health, zoning, services, greenways, crime, trash, traffic, and more.
• Do you want to make sense of data? If you think that a mountain of data exists now, just wait until next year. GIS helps you make sense of all of that data, and to develop critical thinking skills to help you understand what data to use, and what not to use.
• Do you want to blaze new trails? Many if not most of the GIS-related jobs in the future have not even been invented yet, so market yourself! Propose a new position in an organization that you are interested in. Make your case that you are the one to staff that position!
Any such attempt of the “most important” themes is subject to discussion: I welcome your feedback!
- Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager
These are all great points about choosing GIS as a career. I do a lot of presentations to 100-level college classes in various fields, in which many of the students are still deciding what they want to do “when they grow up.” I always tell them that I am still deciding that! That’s why I love being GIS specialist.
This next comment may cause some discussion. A colleague of mine referred to my job as “renaissance man,” and when her young son asked what that meant, I told him it is another term for “short attention span.” I will never be a wildlife biologist, nor a firefighter, nor a computer programmer, nor a full time teacher, nor a scientist of any sort. However, in doing GIS I get to work in all of the fields and hopefully teach all of my clients about each others’ work.
Joseph rightly points out that the GIS profession is young, and that many GIS-related jobs haven’t even been invented yet. In fact, the U.S. Department of Labor recognized the first two GIS occupations in 2009–”Geospatial Information Scientists and Technologists” and “Geographic Information Systems Technicians.” You’ll find a great deal of information about these occupations by searching the DoL’s online occupations database at http://www.onetonline.org/. Try an “Occupation Quick Search” on the keyword “GIS.”
In 2010, the DoL also published a “Geospatial Technology Competency Model” that identifies the knowledge, skills and abilities needed for successful careers in the geospatial industry (which includes GIS). You can explore the GTCM at http://www.careeronestop.org/competencymodel/ (follow the link to “Geospatial Technology”)
Both these resources–the occupation descriptions and the industry competency model–provide useful insights about the GIS-related occupations that *do* exist today. Look closely and you’ll see that the DoL estimates that approximately 420,000 U.S. workers are employed in one of the two GIS occupations, and that nearly 140,000 more workers will be needed in the next ten years! No wonder they characterize these occupations as having a “bright outlook.”