5

I am keen to make a career in GIS.

What should I work upon to possess the adequate skills and can you recommend some good colleges for a GIS-oriented Postgraduate course?

1 Answer 1

10

This question has been converted to Community Wiki and wiki locked because it is an example of a question that seeks a list of answers and appears to be popular enough to protect it from closure. It should be treated as a special case and should not be viewed as the type of question that is encouraged on this, or any Stack Exchange site, but if you wish to contribute more content to it then feel free to do so by editing this answer.

Career advice is best provided individually and, since the aim of the Main site of GIS SE is to maximize re-use of its answers, it should not be sought here. However, once you have attained a reputation of 20 you are free to seek career advice in our GIS Chat Room.


A good way to get your hands dirty is to contribute to one of the many FOSS projects out there. For instance, there are over 600 bugs in the QGIS database. It also has a good plugin architecture, so if you can think of something that hasn't been covered, then write and contribute your own plugin. I'm on the developer mailing list, and they're a good bunch of people always on the lookout for people willing to contribute.

Have a look at the OSGEO website which has a number of open source projects under its auspices that you could contribute to, which gives you a chance to find an area you're interested in. In fact, as you're educated to degree level, it would be a good idea to start thinking about concentrating on a few areas of expertise - do you want to deal with database programming, cartography, or like me combining my degree in archaeology with my love of all things maps and programming to advance the use of GIS in archaeology.

A possibility might be to see if your national mapping agency is hiring. I worked for the Ordnance Survey in the UK as a GIS programmer with no prior GIS experience apart from a love of maps.

As for colleges, it depends on which country you're in and whether you're willing to move. In the UK, Leeds, Edinburgh, and Sheffield, to name just a few, have GIS courses, but they tend to be part of a more general geography degree.


'Making sure that you understand geodesy..to me..the kind of ideas underpinning GIS is paramount. I have taken trigonometry and an assorted list of math curriculum. Please correct me if I am wrong, I think Trigonometry is important in GIS programming for figuring out route and relationships between GIS data..for example, if the user picks a point and then wants to create the nearest point on all lines in a line dataset in relation to that point...programmatically...


In Canada, Fleming College, Centre of Geographic Sciences (COGS) and BC Institute of Technology (BCIT) are good choices. All I would recommend beyond the scope of what you'll absorb in a post-grad is that you familiarize yourself with a greater range of open-source software. Mostly you'll learn using the ESRI suite, which is licensed to colleges free I believe, but many in the industry will opt to avoid the licensing fees or they like to juggle different software. Job postings frequently mention FME, PostGIS, Geoserver, etc.

One more thing. Even with a programming focus, you would do well to create a portfolio with some stellar maps. The industry cites map-production skills frequently.

The demand for fresh, skilled GIS workers does not seem great anymore though.

0

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.