First, many thanks to Leslie for putting together a survey to collect some of this data from the NEARC listserv community. I’m very interested in learning what the survey turns up.

Second, Leslie’s survey is structured in a really useful way: partitioning the required/desired specific tool knowledge according to whether the position is in management-, professional-, or technician-level. I’d be surprised if the answers didn’t vary quite a bit across those categories.

Speaking from the perspective of one public-sector GIS shop, when I’m hiring a GIS technician, I’m looking for someone to carry out some well-defined set of tasks with a specified toolset. Knowledge of that toolset is absolutely essential for such a position: budget and schedule have been allocated to get a specific job accomplished, not to train someone on things not related to the specifics of that project. More general/broad knowledge of the world of GIS is certainly a “nice to have” – mostly because it suggests the candidate has an inquiring/probing intellect - but the lack of it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker.

Moving further up the food chain, knowledge of specific tools becomes increasingly less critical, and broader knowledge of the world of GIS tools and technologies becomes more and more so. While many of the projects my team works on are similar to ones we’ve done in the past, this is becoming less and less the case. There are more “outlier projects” that require us to think and work in new ways, and to ramp-up on new tools and technologies – often very quickly. This is where knowledge of only one toolset – however deep – can actually be a negative. There’s old aphorism worth quoting here: “If the only tool you know is a hammer, every problem you run in to will look like a nail.”

The reality is that the GIS software ecosystem as a whole is developing and growing by leaps and bounds; moreover, that rate of development is accelerating. While commercial vendors periodically roll out new versions of their products, most of these seem to be good, old-fashioned periodic incremental releases. It’s pretty rare that something game-changing is introduced. Over the past several years, most of the things that have made me “sit up and take notice” have been happening on the open-source side of the world rather than the commercial side.

To reply to Jessie Braden’s question: I don’t think it’s the quite case that my agency “strongly prefers” ArcGIS (when compared to QGIS, say), but rather that ArcGIS has a such huge “installed base” of existing MapDoc’s (.mxd’s), personal-, file-, and SDE-feature classes we’ve accumulated over (literally) decades of work that people are pretty much forced to work with it. Our GIS people need to be able to work with this stuff with some degree of fluency (if not necessarily virtuoso-level skill) simply because it is there. (From a vendor’s perspective, this is where the real value of having an installed base is. If huge fraction of a customer’s assets are in your proprietary format, you’re a long way towards having a captive market.) If truth be told, the level of skill we need here on the order of what any reasonably intelligent person can develop in one or two semesters of coursework using ArcGIS.

Although one might hypothesize that start-ups are more likely to turn to open-source GIS software than the public sector, this isn’t necessarily be the case. The public sector is often asked to do more and more with less and less. When you’re faced with a very finite – and perhaps shrinking – budget, open-source looks awfully attractive. Not just because it’s free (if no support is purchased) or likely to be less expensive (if support is purchased), but because it’s often at least as good, if not better, than a commercial alternative.

So to conclude, from the perspective of what I’d like to see from GIS educators, my answer is: graduates who have a well-rounded knowledge of the field: database principles, spatial analysis techniques, cartography, and the like. Ideally, I’d like them to be able to think algorithmically, and be able to fluently express algorithmic thought in a (modern) programming language such as JavaScript or Python, say. I’d like them to be competent users of more than one GIS package (e.g., ArcGIS and at least one other). But the most important thing I’m looking for is the demonstrated ability to ramp-up on new GIS tools and technologies swiftly, fluently, and with real enthusiasm … because a huge chunk of what they know today will be getting long-in-the-tooth in 5 years, if not sooner.

All best,

Ben

Benjamin Krepp  |  Manager of GIS and IT

CENTRAL TRANSPORTATION PLANNING STAFF

857.702.3670  | [log in to unmask]

www.ctps.org/bostonmpo

I agree 100% with Jarlath, but it also occurs to me to ask the members of the listserv Christina’s real question. As an employer – do you care greatly whether a potential employee has geospatial software experience with a particular product or just enough experience to apply their knowledge and learn any product? Since I have gotten in trouble before for asking questions that end up causing too much email traffic…I will make a simple survey monkey to collect some responses…..And then report back the results.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/LMD9VCS

LP

Honestly I don’t think it matters, whatever you teach it will have radically changed in 2-3 years. The software packages have such similar capabilities, the challenge is not overloading students with so many different geospatial solutions that they spend more time learning the buttonology than doing things.

Blog: http://letters-sal.blogspot.com/

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