Geographic Information Systems as a Career

0:00 hey there everyone I hope you're rocking today geographic information systems is a booming industry right now it's applicable in many different fields including marketing surveying urban planning environmental protection agriculture disaster mitigation geology Geoscience and of course geophysics in this video I'm going to talk about the pluses and the minuses I see in GIS as a career before I get going if you have any questions or concerns or anything you want me to talk about just leave them down below let's get Rocking [Music]

0:48 hi there I'm dr. Chris professional gia scientist three years ago I couldn't have told you what geographic information systems even meant today I have a career which incorporates my deep understanding of geophysics with my training in GIS it's challenging I have a lot of responsibilities and I really enjoy what I'm doing in this video I'm going to talk about some positives and some negatives that I see about a career in geographic information systems let's get Rocking the first good thing about a career in GIS is that it is applicable in many fields if the career can integrate steel spatial data imagery location information or some innovative

1:35 mix therein you've got a great GIS career a major fruitful thing to do is to take all your knowledge in the GIS world as assuming you're a GIS person and applying that into some other field that maybe not necessarily has T is applied to it yet what this means is that if you're creative the career paths are enormous however this leads into the first problem with the career in GIS GIS is not a profession there's no governing body to dictate skills level if you're even partly keen you can learn most of it off of YouTube you know at worst a GIS person as a software jockey someone who just knows how to press the right buttons at the right time to do the

2:22 right thing without actually knowing anything really about what they're doing you could look at it as a good thing that anybody can learn it but it's also a bad thing because anybody can learn it I would say it's similar to say someone like myself who knows Adobe products inside and out but I've got no formal training obviously there's gonna be professional level GIS people and there's entry level GIS people and there's you know ones that can I'm not saying this a medicine to hack their way through it there's a big difference between competent people and software jockeys but ultimately GIS is not a profession however GIS is a great tool worked with many other tools for instance programming back in my previous work experience I did a lot of

3:08 programming I brought that knowledge into my GIS career or I'm able to build applications for in-house work and put them online as well there's also a major artistic aspect of a GIS career and I love arts so I'm able to mold my artistic senses into my career daily it's also a great research tool again as I said before it's something where if you can think your way around it you can incorporate geospatial data into something new or even into some research that you are already doing in fact if you're a PhD or a master's student in some scientific field I would say you know give GIS a shot it may enhance some of your research overall for me it's

3:54 actually enhanced my creativity in my career and that creativity has been actually a plus but that also brings me to the next problem a GIS career depending on your expectations can be a pretty low paying job I started my training in GIS to get out of oil that's because oil was in the and I needed something else now I knew the GIS was gonna be useful for something I was gonna do in the future but I wasn't quite sure what it was and then I looked at the salaries for GIS people strictly GIS people and I was a bit shocked the low end of a GIS career seemed to be about minimum wage but again this

4:42 pertains to the fact that GIS isn't a profession and almost anybody can be a software jockey pressing buttons so if you think you're gonna be doing GIS as a career in GIS it's probably best if you think it more as a add-on to whatever career that you're thinking about doing this way you can enhance your career and probably make a lot more money finally I'm going to talk about the fact that I'm really not talking about a career in GIS I'm talking about incorporating GIS into your rear for me this is worked out for other people I could see they're not working out but one thing I can say for sure is that I've been having loads of fun incorporating GIS into what I do every single day from the programming from the

5:28 artistic mapmaking from the designing of the data structures deploying information online GIS as an added part of your career is great fun and those are my thoughts on geographic information systems as a career it can be applied to many different industries does require a bit of creativity to maximize your potential and it can be great fun GIS is working out for me and it can quite possibly work out for you thanks for watching if you like this video please give me a big thumbs up subscribe to my channel add me to your LinkedIn or even better share my videos through your networks until next time I'm dr. Chris keep rockin [Music]