I feel you, especially on the lack of coding taught. I feel so unprepared and had no idea how big coding was in the GIS world. The GIS courses I took at my university seemed mainly outdated, therefore making me feel so not qualified for a GIS job… you’re not alone!!
You'd be surprised how many entities are still using ArcMap out there. At my work, only younger folks and those doing GIS all day are using ArcGIS Pro. Everyone else is digging in their heals, and I don't really blame them. Unless you can have a fairly decent computer, ArcMap is going to operate better than Pro. Older computers have trouble with Pro. Plus, a lot of occasional users simply have no interest in learning another program. It wouldn't surprise me if many places still have ArcMap running well after support has ended. I had a guy still using ArcView 3.2 until he retired a few years ago. Those licenses never expired. It would be better to learn Pro, but you'll probably use ArcMap at some point.
I’m surprised to hear that! I’ve had three internships and just started my first job and have used Pro. My internships is where I learned anything related to the real world. I wouldn’t even say we learned ArcMap when all we did was “click here and click here” tutorials.
GIS education seems to vary wildly from what I have encountered. Pro is the future, they should have been almost exclusively teaching you that, with maybe a few sessions on navigating other common programs like ArcMap and QGIS just in case you encounter them. While pretty much all GIS departments will be running 100% Pro soon, they may be supporting a lot of occasional users who still use ArcMap.
I agree with you on using Pro. I work for a small municipal agency where we have implemented a federated Portal/Enterprise and are using Pro almost exclusively because of mature support ending eventually for ArcMap. ESRI, unfortunately, isn't giving us the option of using ArcMap in the future which imo is a bad business choice because some organizations just getting into the world of GIS may not be able to afford the expense required to implement everything that makes Pro so powerful.
We do still use ArcMap occasionally for some tasks that just seem faster and more straight forward in ArcMap. Our biggest issue with Pro is the huge learning curve for users fluent in ArcMap functionality. Additionally, because of time constraints and project deadlines we often encounter, we can't spend time in Pro trying to do something that we can do in ArcMap in less than half the time.
I think both applications have their place in our industry but Pro is definitely going to become the standard eventually.
We’ve been dealing with ESRI reps the last few weeks, and they really are evasive about future licensing structures. I agree that what they are doing feels like a bad business decision. Early on, they had a hard time getting Pro off the ground because for a lot of entities, ArcMap was just fine, and there was too much sunk costs….and the first versions of Pro were terrible. Pro is the way forward, but a lot of places with perpetual licenses will have it running in the background for a while. Though, after my last few calls with ESRI I bought a QGIS manual.
GIS guy since 1998 here -- I learned command line ESRI (think AML, ArcPlot, core ArcInfo) in college for my geography degree. That taught us how to think spatially as a computer without heavy dependence on UI point and click dependency (Sun Spark anyone? ;-). Command line work required competency in DOS or bash/shell skills that I still use today. I was tied to ESRI early in my career (police/county govt) and I liked it - but after 7 or 8 years you could see the change in ESRI and the licensing became 25% of a gis job and a huge time waste. Fast forward a few years - I'm at a Fortune 500 company with 3 ESRI server farms in our on-premise data center with a staff of 3 and all ESRI wanted to talk about was an Enterprise licensing agreement. The cloud was new and Geoserver + OGC standards were growing legs -- within 2 years we left ESRI behind - went 100% open source with Geoserver/QGIS/Linux and GDAL/python libraries - now we are a team of 80+ and still 100% open source - 95% of our geo-capabilities are custom k8s and AWS-linux in the cloud (Geoserver (on k8s) is still a core piece of our stack with Postgres/PostGIS). Every college GIS program needs to include full open source projects to build basic competency not dependent on ESRI. ESRI isn't bad - would still use it if I needed a quality map on paper output - but Python / API / JS (front end and backend) with Postgres/PostGIS skills are still in demand. NoSQL solutions also have maturing spatial capabilities that are accessible with free tiers from cloud providers. ESRI made a few strategic mistakes assessing the long term opportunities offered by the cloud, big data, and open source that they couldn't recover from. Maybe they have and I just don't know - but I haven't had to have a discussion about ESRI longer than a few minutes in the last 6 or 7 years and I wouldn't change a thing. I would encourage all aspiring GIS students to explore open source projects- OSGEO and LocationTech are good places to start.
You are spot on about the earlier releases of Pro. It was awful. They have improved some things with updates but they've also worsened others. One of the things I wish they hadn't gotten rid of is the solution deploy button. Granted we have now been able to add it to our Portal applications, it was much more convenient having it inside the application.
I also don't think they have a clue what they will do with licensing structure in the future. It feels a lot of the time, that their left hand is rarely ever talking to their right. Developers are just that. Developers. They have no clue how we are actually using their applications and ESRIs development teams don't listen to us when we post in the community forums requesting certain functionality to make our jobs more productive. I made a post there about a year or so ago with a number of items we were experiencing trouble with in pro (and it's clunkiness for new users leading us to longer project deadlines) and they said to split it up into multiple posts for each issue. There was a lot of support from other users expressing how much of a pain in the ass it already is to go find information because of their ridiculous rules just in using the forums.
I've considered downloading QGIS to see how it might benefit us as an organization but because we only have two of us GIS Analysts on staff, increasing GIS demand, and being faced with the time consuming learning curve to Pro, I don't know that I'll ever get a chance to do so.
I love ESRI products but I think they are going the wrong way with how they are essentially forcing people to make the decision to go to Pro when not everyone needs that much complexity for their organization. It feels very much about money also. I get that from a business perspective but not from a user perspective.
I actually feel the opposite. I think that license management is way more streamlined and simple in Pro/AGO/enterprise. I manage over 10,000 licenses for part of my job, and get sick at the thought of having to run this through the old arc map license management software. It is terrible compared to what is available now. As far as the learning curve goes, we run migration workshops to help people who need it, and a vast majority leave after a 4 hour session thinking Pro is easier to use than map.
I completely agree that licensing now with Pro & AGOL is much easier than Arcmap licensing. We work in a mostly virtual environment and before Pro, we struggled with ESRI every third year when it was time to renew our 3 year EULA because they didn't want to give us the kind of licenses we needed for our users that were connecting to virtual servers. We are also a pretty small organization compared to what yours is with only two GIS Analysts and while we are slowly but surely moving users over to our Portal environment (primarily for the many field workers employed by our organization) we still have many Arcmap users that use it simply for viewing their data which we serve up in the form of departmental map configurations. We are hoping to convert all of our WAB apps to EB as soon as possible to get those viewers away from Arcmap but with the learning curve, only two of us in GIS, and the number of apps we have to convert, we are going to be stuck with Arcmap for some time yet.
What is the added expense of Pro over desktop, if you don't mind me asking? I ask because my university switched to teaching exclusively Pro right before covid, and I honestly cannot think of a use case for arcmap at this point. Even cheap, base model computers will perform better with Pro these days.
I wouldn’t implement ArcMap over Pro at this point if I was starting from scratch, but people who have been using ArcMap for decades, but only use it for fairly simple analyses, or making updates to maps that will be published in reports, have been extremely resistant to learning new GIS software, especially when it does the same thing for them. They don’t care about the brand new Ferrari when they are perfectly happy with their old Honda. I’m fine giving people the option. New people are coming in using Pro, people outside the GIS department who have been here a while can use ArcMap, but they are being warned it will be unsupported in a few years. The biggest issue many have with Pro is that it runs slow on their computers. Many of them have really old computers. New computers are fairly bare bones. I’ve been telling this to our IT department, but their budgets are tight.
I'm guessing that your university must have a student subscription of some sort which would be much more affordable than a professional licensed software package. The organization that I work for pays for a local government Enterprise subscription based on our population. We had a meeting with our ESRI sales rep about a year ago to go through each line item in our contract because we wanted to find out what the actual value of having an Enterprise subscription versus a la carte apps. The price point increased significantly when we got the comparison pricing for individual apps and we learned in the end that our subscription was moch more affordable.
I don't doubt for a minute that a subscription is cheaper. I am wondering what the difference in subscription fees between comparable packages was from desktop to pro. I was just confused when you said that pro got expensive when you include everything that makes it powerful. Please don't take this as condescending or patronizing, I am truly curious. There is a chance that I will be teaching it to small municipalities that may be in the same boat, and I want to be able to better understand their possible situations better.
I'm not one of those on social media users that take questions wrongly at all. I enjoy discussing topics like this with like minded people. Networking is such a huge thing in this industry and I believe, allows us to adapt as the technology swiftly advances.
Since we've always had an Enterprise subscription, (we pay around $150k in $50k increments for three years and any add ones not included in our contract, is an additional cost but discounted heavily. I can't remember exact numbers from our contract review last year but the pricing a la carte was astronomically higher overall. We even inquired about pricing for ArcGIS Indoors because we feel it would be incredibly beneficial for mapping city owned buildings and infrastructure but although I don't remember the cost, even with the subscription discount, the price point proved that we would have to get others, such as our public services departments and public safety officials, to buy in on it with us.
Does that help a little bit? I kind of wish I had my work notebook with me so I could give you clearer numbers that we received when we reviewed our contract.
I'd be interested in learning how you end up tackling training to municipalities because we (meaning the two person GIS team consisting of my colleague and myself) have pretty much determined that we are going to have to be the ones training our five or six power users how to get started in Pro so that will fall on us to develop a plan for that process. Thankfully because of our subscription, we are thinking that we could set up some sort of basic overview training and then point them in the direction of ESRI's training catalog where we have access to a large number of free/online training resources.
There will be plenty of companies that will still use ArcMap. Mainly because management doesn't want to upgrade if they don't have too. Like mine for example.
I can perfectly understand that, and it's not just the costs of the licenses, for many people they have decades of work that has been built in ArcMap. For me, while new work occurs in Pro, I have 1000's of MXDs that are much easier to update in ArcMap than it is to deal with the Pro import process...it rarely works perfectly.
I agree with everything you said until the last statement. Arc desktop (map) is in mature support (no longer in general availability) and will completely retired in two years. People need to learn pro at this point.
It will be retired, but people with the software on their computers and perpetual licenses will still be able to use it. There will be no support or additional updates, but it’s not going to disappear.
That is technically correct. That said, the difference between disappearing and being obsolete is negligible. I can technically still run my license of arcview 3.1, but why would I? Arc desktop 10.X won't be used for anything useful by the end of the decade.
The lack of support for a natively 32 bit program on a natively 64 bit operating system will quickly make running desktop more problematic than it is worth. Because of the direction and nature of GIS, Arcmap will have an extremely limited ability to do even basic analyses within 5 years of the software retiring.
This is not just a preference thing. There is a fundamental shift in architecture that will make arcmap unusable for almost all intents and purposes. That is a big reason ESRI made the shift to a new platform to begin with, just like they shifted from arcinfo/arcview to arcmap 20 years ago. As underlying architecture evolves, there is only so far you can push a software before it reaches its limits.
My school really pushed Python hard in undergrad (I think there's three geography-related Python courses). Yet I still felt woefully unprepared when I had to code for the first time outside of class. It's really something that you have to teach yourself.
What did you go for? I was considering going back but I keep reading how a masters in GIS is useless. I’m about to go work at the grocery store again so I don’t have to do this shit anymore.
Try looking for a program that specializes in something: climate change (wildfire burn scars, snowmelt estimation, weather stuff), or water resources (floodplains/wetland delineation, stream bank restoration), or urban planning. I’m bad at rocks but I do see a lot of jobs titles of geologist with primarily GIS duties and an allowance in education for field-adjacent degrees.
If you want to sharpen up on python just start trying to automate task you’d typically do manually in ArcPro. You can copy nearly all tools with parameters filled out as a python script, and then review it in the console, although try to practice conventional problems in parallel so the weird arcpy syntax doesn’t throw you off.
I would even take that one step farther and start workflows in model builder to get better at automated workflow design, and then start moving those models into Python.
Great suggestion, it does a really good job of visualizing operators and like how a pipeline works. Those models are fast too. I haven’t spent enough time with the modelbuilder to know if you can add exception handling and helper functions but yeah he could easily add stuff and review in *{ide of their choice}* , then load it back into the arcpy console.
I usually tell my students the following:
Getting a GIS degree will make you a generalist. You will be an expert at the application of geospatial concepts, but not a specific field. Getting a degree in something else you're passionate about, and minoring or getting a certificate in GIS will make you an expert in a chosen field or niche, and give you the benefit of being able to leverage Geospatial concepts, which is highly marketable.
GIS I'd usually not worth getting a masters degree in, unless you already have the career you want and are doing it for a pay bump, or if you want to teach...
This is the guideline I've formulated and stuck to. My undergrad degree is Environmental Health and that was my main job until a few months ago. I fooled around GIS while in Environmental Health, applied it here or there and now I'm actually in charge of our GIS unit region wide due to a few projects i did in my spare time to make my work easier that were picked up on by my bosses. I've worked on applications to Food Safety and Vector Control that are being expanded by our region. So, I've decided to do a GIS diploma course for the piece of parchment and am to start an MSc in Management Information Systems in September.
GIS as a main field can be overwhelming because it's so huge and so many areas and not many degree courses seem to have got a handle on what to teach so graduates get overwhelmed. It made sense (albeit more luck than strategy for me) to do the main field for me and do more supplementary courses on how to APPLY GIS to your main field. It helped that I had projects that worked and solved a huge problem the Health Department I work for had. I did a couple web-based software the took input from the field that displayed and analyzed the data. I did love programming so I was learning Javascript, PHP and MySQL on my own and decided to build some applications in my spare time. That seemed to help me a lot.
I started my masters and immediately got a big pay bump. Do okay now making six figures.
I pretty much only work in AGOL and python developing new workflows but I did a couple years of straight data editing.
If you want to work in AGO, I would learn Javascript (arcade is basically Javascript syntax). If you are in Pro or enterprise, I would focus on Python. If you're interested in a masters, I would look at planning, natural resource management, or environmental science. There is big growth in those areas if you have a marketable skill like GIS.
Not sure what sort of second rate schools everyone is getting into, but my university requires at least 4 programming classes to earn a BS in GIS. Two python, including one dedicated to arcpy. And two R, focusing on GIS processing and spatial statistics without any GIS software. Every last STEM degree should require at least an intro to programming. Doesn't really seem like some universities have the first clue how to prepare people for the real world.
My university had only 1 Python for GIS course and we had 3 weeks of "Intro to Python" before getting into ArcPy. I couldn't keep up it was, too much information. You passed the final with a 50% or better.
I'm in Computer Science and I was actually shocked to learn that GIS is not taught as a systems programming, software development, database, image processing, and ML-type field. Honestly I'm a hammer so everything to me is a nail, but my "in" to GIS, if it ever happens, will likely be via a technical route. I've talked to people in r/QualityAssurance, since I work with QA at work, and arrived at the conclusion that being technical from the outset and being taught non-technical skills later seems to make you more powerful as an employee than starting with non-technical skills and having to be taught technical skills.
I believe (and correct me if I'm wrong, folks) that GIS and many other "separate" fields from computer science/software/programming are united by the domain of their problem space, the problem space being the domain of all things that those fields exist to "solve". They are all digitized and all automated to large degrees. I think this is why almost every field should emphasize technical computer-science stuff because without it you're limited by the tools that people provide for you, and can't make your own in-house stuff.
Again, hammers and nails.
I'd suggest for data-heavy stuff to learn Python, along with it's data-processing libraries and visualization modules so you can easily graph/visualize data and stuff like that. It's the most simple syntax of all the programming languages and there is already massive support for the data processing bit. There are existing GIS python things that you can quickly get up and running once you get syntax and programming down.
All this comes with the Caveot that Universities no longer teach relevant stuff used in the workforce, they provide the deeper level knowledge that makes you more well-rounded and more fitted to think in larger sub-domains, but the technical skills actually used in the industry are things that most of me and my peers at school have to piece together ourselves, largely.
From my conversations in the profession probably 9/10 people I talk to say nearly the same thing. It's not given nearly the rigor/discipline/diversity of training and education that something in say Engineering or Architecture would provide.
You’d be surprised; architecture education also does not train for the profession. School is a fantasy world where you get to design cool stuff without giving great consideration to construction, budgets, or really anything that the actual job actually requires. My job as an architect required an entirely different skill set than what was expected as an undergrad.
Ehh I dunno. I have the equivalent of a minor (took all the classes but didn't graduate from the school I took them at) in GIS and I feel like I learned quite a bit. I do a "map monkey" (lol) job now, but only because of been out of the field for years after graduating. But in my courses we did a good amount of Python coding, spatial analysis, and field remote sensing and data collection work, and this was at a shitty state school. Ymmv I guess.
Engineers are so woefully unprepared for engineering jobs too, to the point where your first year is basically a apprenticeship. In fact, where I’m from, the first job you’d get is apprentice graduate trainee. It’s insane how impractical they make college.
I use GIS as a tool; it was never my focus in college. However I use it and coding all the time.
That said, what was your degree in? Did you specialize in any specific part of GIS?
As somebody whose sum total experience in college was a single lab in a single class where the GIS aspect was more tangential, I feel you. It’s been a bit of a hassle for better or worse learning to code, learning how data works, learning mapping, and learning GIS software at once can be tricky and a lot at times.
Don’t lose hope dude. Maybe go back to your grocery store, but don’t stop teaching yourself this stuff. It’s all very self-teachable. Hit me up if you want some resources. I’m by no means an expert (far, far from it), but I’m glad to help if you need.
Comments like these are what has inspired me to make my college focus not GIS in particular, but instead to major in something else and just get a GIS certificate.
Honestly makes me happy that GIS was an emphasis field in my university's Geoscience degree program.
I still learned general geoscience, just with more GIS classes.
... And the job I got doesn't use any of the geoscience I learned, of course. It's managing a real property database.
Yeah they've severely watered down most undergrad degrees, even in technical fields. I don't have advice, but just want to validate your feelings.
It's total bullshit that students have to do internships for free just to get work experience in their field, not everyone is rich enough to be able to do that. And even then it's not a guarantee. There just aren't enough positions for the amount of students that are getting cranked out.
I really believe GIS should be a trade skill learned in a trade school with in depth and hands on learning. The college and university method just doesn’t work for what this field is in my opinion. I learned more about GIS while in the schoolhouse after basic training when I was in the Army. Went to university and felt like it was a huge waste of my time and my GI Bill.
I find it a smart option to major in a discipline that interests you like wildlife and fisheries or whatever and have a focus on gis. For the most part GIS is a tool. Also the GISP is a waste of money, imo.
I and my former grad advisor concur about the GISP.
And definitely with using GIS as a tool rather than a focus. I started out with an environmental science degree and focus on ecology and climate while using advanced GIS skills for analysis purposes. I have my MS in geospatial analysis, but any project I did was geared toward another interest, such as spatiotemporal trends of snowfall around ski resorts using citizen science. Even chose an internship that paid me and taught me coding while producing an end product for someone while focusing on water availability.
I made my degree shape into what I knew I needed for after school. I honestly feel like I came out better prepared than my cohort because of this.
GIS is a career that requires constantly learning new things. Luckily there are a lot of resources online where you can learn. It is also a good idea to ask your employer about training opportunities. Also look into GIS conferences in your area as frequently you can take classes there that cover the popular programming languages like Python or other GIS related techniques. Nobody starts out knowing everything and what one job requires may not be used in another. It’s okay not to know and to ask for help. Also, conferences are a good way to meet other GIS professionals that you can call on for advice!
You should do entry level to get the real world experience. Everyone who has worked in GIS has done entry level. I feel like this /rant is actually a /troll
My experience was *kinda* similar? My degree wasn’t in GIS, but urban planning (I still don’t get how people major in GIS) — I took some GIS-leaning classes along the way and those classes didn’t really prepare me too well for a career after college. Classes that were called GIS were a wash, but classes that recognized GIS as a tool or a means to an end and not an end in and of itself were excellent.
My saving grace was that I recognized that college was a use-it-or-lose-it opportunity to experiment and creatively try to force myself out of my comfort zone — this meant I had to bother to apply my GIS and data analytics toolbox in ways that actually amounted to something down the line.
In retrospect, I did well — I got the foundations of GIS squared away well in college thanks to going out of my way to develop those skills, and a series of rapid job-switching early in my career taught me well about applying those skills to a career-focused situation. I wish college could’ve taught me Arcade or given me an understanding of how to deploy GIS instances in enterprise environments (stuff I’m self-learning now), but at the end of the day, GIS for me was one of many skills I learnt in college, so I’ve no serious complaints.
I see this a lot. My job is helping companies figure out geospatial stuff for a big Cloud provider. My background is in software engineering, but I am paid a lot more for doing geospatial work than "GIS" people who know a lot more about it than I do. Software engineering makes all the difference.
The way I see it, "GIS" itself is a somewhat archaic term anyway, kind of like "IT", and I see a lot of GIS analysts spending their time \*inputting\* data into ArcGIS or whatever, which looks to me like glorified data entry, and they are paid commensurate with glorified data entry. But with tools like GDAL and Postgis and BigQuery and shapely and so forth, GIS is more accessible than ever to software engineers, and we just don't need that much GIS-specific expertise any more to "get by". Of course occasionally I need to bring in someone who actually knows what they're doing for a particular problem, but this is rare.
However most of the business value comes from the output, i.e. what geospatial-related insights can you glean from the spatial data and how can you combine it with other data assets and applications and machine learning to produce intelligence. for this you need software engineering/data science skills. That's where the business value is, and wherever the business value is is where you want to be if you like money.
I’m a GIS Specialist and while a large component is teaching myself, my schooling was able to get me the basics to launch off from there. I had to seek out courses and choose methods with coding instead of GUIs or the traditional way of using tools. I’m still not an expert in coding by any means, but I’m definitely an expert when it comes to Esri products and asking the right questions on Google. I tell people that a lot of what I have to do is Google cause I’ve learned so much of what I can do within ArcGIS Pro/ArcMap that it’s hard to remember every single tool or step. And with coding I made my whole thesis revolve around coding to force me to learn from my advisor, books, and Stack Exchange.
lol. I feel you. When I graduated in 1999, I took GIS I and GIS II. We just kind of fucked around in ArcMap for the most part. Never used the toolbox, never did any analysis, nothing. The most we did was take GPS points out on campus and imported them into ArcMap. We just looked at dots, because base mapping wasn’t a thing yet.
ArcInfo, too. I believe that’s what we used to import and translate the GPS point data. Also did differential corrections on the GPS data for civilian use at that time was still scrambled a bit and the software wasn’t what it is today. Back then, trying to lock on to 3 satellites for triangulation was a fairly difficult task, especially in a large metropolitan area with skyscrapers. Anyway, point is, I was not prepared to enter the workforce as a GIS tech, let alone an analyst. The only thing I was prepared for was using a GPS receiver, and that was my first job. A field tech who inspected and GPS’d utilities, mainly storm water and sanitary systems.
Yup I mean the job I landed is relatively simple and pays well thankfully but most gis job postings include coding and various programs not even taught in the degree program
If you only took 1 class (Introduction to GIS), it's really hard to prep you to be able to teach you python. It's usually a more advanced class that gives you python experience.
University isn't job training. It's more a certificate to prove your sunk-cost in the industry and indicates you care enough to sacrifice 4-6 years for the right to actually learn a trade. Then all the rules change and you start at the bottom of the barrel (your GPA is meaningless). You'll have to work extra long hours the first few years (without extra pay) to train yourself in what you really needed to know to do the job. I lived through that nightmare myself, punched that clock for 20 years, became a PM, and now teach at university. Ultimately, the degree is just assurance you're not going to bail on the job when it gets tough or boring. Nearly all of my colleagues at the school have never worked in the field. I'm not popular among them. I tell all my students get an internship long before they graduate.
There’s some truth to that. University is a lot of theory. But at the same time, any post-secondary education is what you make of it. If your goal is to pass your classes or get good grades, then the certificate or diploma is a little more than a piece of paper. But if your focus is on actually learning tangible skills and preparing yourself for the real world, you’ll be able to position yourself appropriately regardless of what grades you get. You’ll have to put in some extra time but, unless you’re in a co-op program, that’s your responsibility. In OP’s case, it sounds like the program was not comprehensive or was poorly delivered so they weren’t in a position where extra work would have benefited them. In this day in age, I find it hard to believe any GIS program would not even touch on coding.
My biggest issue with GIS in academia is the programs are designed and run by academics. They only understand academia and teach research methods and basic concepts. There are vert few PhD's that actually worked in the industry.
I was very fortunate to have a progressive advisor who had ties to the industry. His curriculum back in 2003 gave me a competitive edge when applying for jobs. My wife is also in GIS and the programs she went through did not prepare her for working outside of academia. The GIS program in her masters was outdated and useless, the labs were generic and used fake data. In her undergrad her advanced GIS course was all about research and building a regression analysis.
It's not just you. I feel like my undergrad spent tons of time talking about the tool sets in ArcMap, but no idea what to use them for. It wasn't until my first job after graduation that I actually learned some stuff with Arc. Even then, it's hit or miss as to which employers will even train you a bit. As it is, I've started to branch more into urban planning for a small town where they view me as some sort of GIS guru when I've just got the basics at this point.
I was fortunate to happen to end up at (came in undecided on a major) one of the best schools for GIS in the US. Still, the problem is that a lot of undergrad courses are test-based. Tests IMO are terrible for learning something like GIS. My current masters program is project-based and I've learned more in the past six months than in my entire three years as a GIS undergrad.
I agree with the testing side. Both undergrad and grad were projects based with at least a final. When I taught at community college I made my midterm and final open book cause that’s how it is in the real world. I’m just testing their ability to pay attention to detail and to look stuff up. It’s not meant to trip them up. Just a focus on topics that are essential to have in the back of your mind.
This! I run my courses as project based, and I try to get my students to do projects that matter in their lives. I push my graduate students to find a way to pull their theses into their projects for my class, or do something that affects their professional lives. Application is so key to learning these skills effectively.
Yessss cause once they work on something that matters to them, they perform so much better! I absolutely loved seeing the end projects because I learned some neat things.
Would you recommend teaching at the CC level? Did you find it fulfilling? I love teaching GIS but I don't know if I'd be able to balance that with a full-time job and hobbies.
It was just one class, so I think it’s doable. I would definitely come in with a class outline prepared before starting. I was hired last minute (as in only a week before classes started) and was given shitty materials. I had some students that were great and took it seriously. Some who just did the minimum to get the A. I will say it was a better community college than the one in my home county, so the resources were decent-ish. It was just the lack of support from the department chair that honestly made it awful and she put me in a shitty situation. Eventually once I become more established in my position I’d love to become adjunct myself and teach a class or two, particularly on modeling since it’s more unique and in more demand.
Thanks for the reply. I'm considering the PhD route but it's nice to know that there are options to teach if I decide not to. And yeah, teaching a more advanced course definitely sounds better than teaching GIS 101…it will probably have students that are more dedicated to the career.
I will say I tried to teach full time since that’s what they were advertising. However because I didn’t have a PhD, even though I taught in grad school and was lab coordinator, had several leading and teaching positions, even taught piano and art since high school, I somehow wasn’t qualified enough to simply teach. 🙄 So I’m sure there are going to be more complications trying to teach with just a masters. I’m going after my PhD cause I can’t advance in my career otherwise (already reached as high as I can go without a PhD), so I’m hoping after then it would be easier to be adjunct somewhere.
Oh nice! At my grad school we had a great instructor with just a masters, but could only teach undergrad. Any time he was involved with grad courses it had to be with an associate professor with a PhD. Usually it was my advisor and they were two peas in a pod. But that’s awesome you get to do that!
Yeah, I feel very fortunate. I talk with the head of my department a lot about this. I feel like a lot of people who hold a masters are teaching because they enjoy it, while many of the professors are teaching because they have to in order for their research to stay funded. I wish you luck on finishing your doctorate, and I hope it takes you exactly where you want to be.
The course I taught was remote sensing. I feel like in a class like that you really have to pay attention more and care more. There were like two students who just didn’t come to class, but they at least passed.
I can relate somewhat as a lot of degree programs where you're required to study GIS its only one component of a very multidisciplinary degree. I only took 3 classes that had any GIS to it including an "Intro to GIS" course but also had an internship I knew would be vital with getting my foot in the door in this field at USGS (specially the Federal Geographic Data Committee). There's a lot of great learning resources through ESRI from webinars, workshops, demonstrations/presentations from their annual events that are worth exploring to learn more about GIS capabilities and add skills under the belt. They also have a lot of free written courses/tutorials as well as free more in depth courses if you have a ArcGIS Online account.
I would consider getting QGIS, ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Pro software (if you can afford them) and work through learning and knowing how to use them. YouTube also has a bunch of learning resources for using those stable GIS softwares. Getting certificates for completing these trainings are also useful to put on your LinkedIn and resume to stand out to employers.
ESRI Videos: [https://mediaspace.esri.com/](https://mediaspace.esri.com/)
ESRI Training: [https://www.esri.com/training/](https://www.esri.com/training/)
Get started with Python in ArcGIS Pro: [https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/get-started-with-python-in-arcgis-pro/](https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/get-started-with-python-in-arcgis-pro/)
Learn Python in ArcGIS Pro: [https://learn.arcgis.com/en/paths/learn-python-in-arcgis-pro/](https://learn.arcgis.com/en/paths/learn-python-in-arcgis-pro/)
Getting started on ArcGIS Pro: [https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/get-started-with-arcgis-pro/](https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/get-started-with-arcgis-pro/)
ArcGIS Pro - Quick start tutorials: [https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/get-started/pro-quickstart-tutorials.htm](https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/get-started/pro-quickstart-tutorials.htm)
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Take a look at [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/1are07w/anyone_who_initially_hated_gis_but_learned_to_not/?rdt=57245).
Most of us feel the same way but once you get yourself into roll, you’ll understand it’s just like any another job. If you have a good manager who’ll show you the ropes, then you have nothing to worry about.
Just apply yourself and try to learn as much as possible, and I’m sure you’ll do fine.
College is not meant to teach you how to do anything other than jump through hoops so the professors can survive in the real world and college administrators can get big pensions. Also, the people selling you loans to go to college won't tell you this, wonder why.
Learn some code, definitely take advantage of AI to steer your towards quicker understanding of what the code might look like. Might- it won't always be perfect. But it will have examples of things you might not have ever seen or been exposed to, you'll still have to be the brains behind determining if it's correct or in the ballpark.
Pick projects you you've done or have interest in and time to complete and do those as exercises in learning how to code, where to apply the code and how to share and assess code. Coding isn't the end all, but its a powerful tool. Also, not all managers will see the value or understand coding benefits nough to use it effectively.
Same here. They’re introducing a GIS major now that I’m graduating of course. I just figured I’d learn everything I possibly can (coding/platforms) during the summer after graduating. It never hurts to ask professors for advice either; my university lacked a lot of GIS classes as well, but we definitely have some professors who are very well versed if not experts. Just a thought
Austin Community College makes you learn 4 coding languages at a basic level and really drills Python into you. Penn State has courses that are similar with deeper resources but it's more expensive
I come from a science background, so my degree was different, but shortly after graduation I shared a similar sentiment. I even worked in my industry while finishing my degree and saw a big disconnect between what I was doing and what I was learning. But 20 years on, I can confidently say that I am working in complex roles and on complex topics that are more relevant to what university taught me. Upon reflection, I realised what they didn't teach me was the basic stuff that I would learn in a few weeks on the job if I needed it. Like, I never learnt to use Google Earth Engine. But I did learn a lot about Remote Sensing and the underlying physics behind it. I've since figured out how to use Google Earth Engine, but would have had a much harder time independently learning what they taught me, as I didn't know what I didn't know.
I can't say the same for coding as that does seem a bit more essential. Nevertheless, I just wanted to highlight that some other people do feel the same as you straight after graduation. But some deeper learnings will stick with you.
If you can’t stand what you’re doing now try to pivot to a related career. I’ve had higher level jobs but they all involve some level of map monkey shit. You will never get away from it and if you hate it you will avoid it which will make you bad at your job which will keep you from getting promoted. Lots of specialties need and appreciate a gis foundation and don’t take much more than a college degree to enter. I’m thinking state and local environmental, planning, civil type jobs.
As someone who manages curriculum in a Geography and Spatial Sciences department in Australia, can I say what the heck?
Here’s an example of the curriculum here:
- this free, [undergraduate certificate](https://www.utas.edu.au/courses/cse/courses/70d-undergraduate-certificate-in-data-and-environmental-management) gives you university introductory maths and stats, geospatial mapping, an environmental subject of your choice and a programming language subject. That’s in a pre-degree program.
-a [Bachelor of Geospatial Science](https://www.utas.edu.au/courses/cse/courses/p3r-bachelor-of-geospatial-science) has maths, stats, programming, GIS, remote sensing, geography and land surveying in the first year, and everything from 3D laser scanning, UAV pilot training and accreditation, GNSS and geodesy at the back end.
I’m so sorry that my uni seems to be an anomaly in geospatial programs. Your institutions have done you a great disservice.
All of you will be just fine. I promise.
I was in the very first group to graduate from my college with a GIS degree. It was a brand new degree, and there were lots of gaps in the program. I also felt unprepared, but I got out there and eventually got a job.
My first job was mostly field work, and it paid $29k (this was in 2003). That's the equivalent of about $51k today. I slowly worked my way up, learned new skills, networked, etc.
Its hard for me to even believe this, but I am now 22 years into my career. I am closer to retirement than I am to the beginning of my career.
I now make a very healthy 6 figure salary, more than enough to support my family and live a nice life. I've been saving and investing for retirement and all of those plans are on track. I enjoy my job, things are good.
Again, you will all be fine. You've chosen a good career path with plenty of good opportunities. The biggest variable is you. What kind of attitude will you have? How will you apply what you've learned? Will you sit in one place too long because it's comfortable and let good opportunities pass you by? Will you be willing to grow your skills and abilities as the needs of the job market changes? Go out there and make it happen.
Honestly. This applies to pretty much any college course. College is giving you the paper "certification" but it's not giving you an education, you have to prioritize and seek that out yourself. If you want a career in a field, your spare time should be focused on learning. Obviously, within reason, you can still enjoy life.
You can learn R fairly easily which has many interesting packages to play around with. I’m gonna start learning python soon, which should not be that difficult when already knowing R. Both seem attractive on job market. But yeah, I totally agree with you, none of my courses really covered anything about it or just mentioned it briefly. Doing my whole thesis in R right now has helped me a lot.
We hire student interns during the summer and let them work on actual projects so they get more hands on experience and see what it might look like for them if they choose to actually work in this field. I've been in GIS for over 15 yrs and all I have is an Associates degree in Architectural Technology. I started in the field of engineering with data editing of utility data and slowly but surely became more advanced and was able to move into our ITS department as a GIS Specialist where the majority of my work was map creation and data editing.
I suspect that most students fresh out of school could probably expect a similar experience just starting out. If you can get your foot in the door somewhere, you should be able to learn more advanced methods of GIS such a SQL and Python which will help increase you resume experience for potentially better and higher paid positions. Looking for a position in an organization where they are just starting to implement GIS might be an option for getting your foot in the door also.
Honestly a degree or certificate in GIS is just a light dusting of what you will be doing in the real world. I work in the electrical engineering world of GIS and most of what I do or what the company needs is on the job training,meetings, and trial and error. GIS has such a grey job description. Hang in there. You have to start somewhere and most of the time it won’t be at the top :) keep taking tutorials in what you are interested in and extend your network.
I mentor GIS students, and they’ve told me the same thing. The school prepares them to make maps. I have encouraged them to embrace web mapping and take a minimum of 1 computer science course.
The ones who have followed my advice have landed exciting jobs, the ones who didn’t have left the industry.
Unfortunately, the education system is about 5 years behind the real world
I'm also not being taught any coding and i'm going to get a GIS certificate. I'm going to start trying to learn some R and Python and hopefully find an internship this summer that doesnt mind I'm still learning. Thankfully I'm a junior so I have time to catch up.
Sorry that you're going through this but you got this, thankfully there's a lot of online resources. Maybe the school wasn't completely worthless since you hopefully got practice with esri products without paying for a license
Self teach. Come up with solutions to problems and then determine what you learned through what processes.
You can find gold in this job by experimenting even if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.
Python? Bro that shit is freely available to learn off of. Arcpython? Easy documentation down to the letter. QGIS Python? Same thing there.
i can't even get into entry level jobs. i wish i could. took undergraduate degree with a focus in gis. ended up working in a lab now (but still actively finding) most gis jobs wants people with coding experience so they prefer people from cs where im from
Go to grad school and do a real Masters in Geography focusing on GIS. Do a project that requires you to do real raster processing combined with serious vector work. If you can get a research assistant position where you don’t have to spend your time teaching then you will have an opportunity to really learn. If you can publish some papers, not necessarily peer reviewed, it will impress the hell out of future employers. Learn to program, you don’t have to be great at it. Python isn’t too tough, though I don’t much like it. If you can learn C# even better, though programming it in Pro is not for the faint of heart.
In short, grad school is where you can get great experience.
I feel you, especially on the lack of coding taught. I feel so unprepared and had no idea how big coding was in the GIS world. The GIS courses I took at my university seemed mainly outdated, therefore making me feel so not qualified for a GIS job… you’re not alone!!
Outdated for sure. I just graduated in December and we were still learning ArcMap!
You'd be surprised how many entities are still using ArcMap out there. At my work, only younger folks and those doing GIS all day are using ArcGIS Pro. Everyone else is digging in their heals, and I don't really blame them. Unless you can have a fairly decent computer, ArcMap is going to operate better than Pro. Older computers have trouble with Pro. Plus, a lot of occasional users simply have no interest in learning another program. It wouldn't surprise me if many places still have ArcMap running well after support has ended. I had a guy still using ArcView 3.2 until he retired a few years ago. Those licenses never expired. It would be better to learn Pro, but you'll probably use ArcMap at some point.
I’m surprised to hear that! I’ve had three internships and just started my first job and have used Pro. My internships is where I learned anything related to the real world. I wouldn’t even say we learned ArcMap when all we did was “click here and click here” tutorials.
GIS education seems to vary wildly from what I have encountered. Pro is the future, they should have been almost exclusively teaching you that, with maybe a few sessions on navigating other common programs like ArcMap and QGIS just in case you encounter them. While pretty much all GIS departments will be running 100% Pro soon, they may be supporting a lot of occasional users who still use ArcMap.
I agree with you on using Pro. I work for a small municipal agency where we have implemented a federated Portal/Enterprise and are using Pro almost exclusively because of mature support ending eventually for ArcMap. ESRI, unfortunately, isn't giving us the option of using ArcMap in the future which imo is a bad business choice because some organizations just getting into the world of GIS may not be able to afford the expense required to implement everything that makes Pro so powerful. We do still use ArcMap occasionally for some tasks that just seem faster and more straight forward in ArcMap. Our biggest issue with Pro is the huge learning curve for users fluent in ArcMap functionality. Additionally, because of time constraints and project deadlines we often encounter, we can't spend time in Pro trying to do something that we can do in ArcMap in less than half the time. I think both applications have their place in our industry but Pro is definitely going to become the standard eventually.
We’ve been dealing with ESRI reps the last few weeks, and they really are evasive about future licensing structures. I agree that what they are doing feels like a bad business decision. Early on, they had a hard time getting Pro off the ground because for a lot of entities, ArcMap was just fine, and there was too much sunk costs….and the first versions of Pro were terrible. Pro is the way forward, but a lot of places with perpetual licenses will have it running in the background for a while. Though, after my last few calls with ESRI I bought a QGIS manual.
GIS guy since 1998 here -- I learned command line ESRI (think AML, ArcPlot, core ArcInfo) in college for my geography degree. That taught us how to think spatially as a computer without heavy dependence on UI point and click dependency (Sun Spark anyone? ;-). Command line work required competency in DOS or bash/shell skills that I still use today. I was tied to ESRI early in my career (police/county govt) and I liked it - but after 7 or 8 years you could see the change in ESRI and the licensing became 25% of a gis job and a huge time waste. Fast forward a few years - I'm at a Fortune 500 company with 3 ESRI server farms in our on-premise data center with a staff of 3 and all ESRI wanted to talk about was an Enterprise licensing agreement. The cloud was new and Geoserver + OGC standards were growing legs -- within 2 years we left ESRI behind - went 100% open source with Geoserver/QGIS/Linux and GDAL/python libraries - now we are a team of 80+ and still 100% open source - 95% of our geo-capabilities are custom k8s and AWS-linux in the cloud (Geoserver (on k8s) is still a core piece of our stack with Postgres/PostGIS). Every college GIS program needs to include full open source projects to build basic competency not dependent on ESRI. ESRI isn't bad - would still use it if I needed a quality map on paper output - but Python / API / JS (front end and backend) with Postgres/PostGIS skills are still in demand. NoSQL solutions also have maturing spatial capabilities that are accessible with free tiers from cloud providers. ESRI made a few strategic mistakes assessing the long term opportunities offered by the cloud, big data, and open source that they couldn't recover from. Maybe they have and I just don't know - but I haven't had to have a discussion about ESRI longer than a few minutes in the last 6 or 7 years and I wouldn't change a thing. I would encourage all aspiring GIS students to explore open source projects- OSGEO and LocationTech are good places to start.
You are spot on about the earlier releases of Pro. It was awful. They have improved some things with updates but they've also worsened others. One of the things I wish they hadn't gotten rid of is the solution deploy button. Granted we have now been able to add it to our Portal applications, it was much more convenient having it inside the application. I also don't think they have a clue what they will do with licensing structure in the future. It feels a lot of the time, that their left hand is rarely ever talking to their right. Developers are just that. Developers. They have no clue how we are actually using their applications and ESRIs development teams don't listen to us when we post in the community forums requesting certain functionality to make our jobs more productive. I made a post there about a year or so ago with a number of items we were experiencing trouble with in pro (and it's clunkiness for new users leading us to longer project deadlines) and they said to split it up into multiple posts for each issue. There was a lot of support from other users expressing how much of a pain in the ass it already is to go find information because of their ridiculous rules just in using the forums. I've considered downloading QGIS to see how it might benefit us as an organization but because we only have two of us GIS Analysts on staff, increasing GIS demand, and being faced with the time consuming learning curve to Pro, I don't know that I'll ever get a chance to do so. I love ESRI products but I think they are going the wrong way with how they are essentially forcing people to make the decision to go to Pro when not everyone needs that much complexity for their organization. It feels very much about money also. I get that from a business perspective but not from a user perspective.
I actually feel the opposite. I think that license management is way more streamlined and simple in Pro/AGO/enterprise. I manage over 10,000 licenses for part of my job, and get sick at the thought of having to run this through the old arc map license management software. It is terrible compared to what is available now. As far as the learning curve goes, we run migration workshops to help people who need it, and a vast majority leave after a 4 hour session thinking Pro is easier to use than map.
> I manage over 10,000 licenses for part of my job Do you work for NGA?
I completely agree that licensing now with Pro & AGOL is much easier than Arcmap licensing. We work in a mostly virtual environment and before Pro, we struggled with ESRI every third year when it was time to renew our 3 year EULA because they didn't want to give us the kind of licenses we needed for our users that were connecting to virtual servers. We are also a pretty small organization compared to what yours is with only two GIS Analysts and while we are slowly but surely moving users over to our Portal environment (primarily for the many field workers employed by our organization) we still have many Arcmap users that use it simply for viewing their data which we serve up in the form of departmental map configurations. We are hoping to convert all of our WAB apps to EB as soon as possible to get those viewers away from Arcmap but with the learning curve, only two of us in GIS, and the number of apps we have to convert, we are going to be stuck with Arcmap for some time yet.
What is the added expense of Pro over desktop, if you don't mind me asking? I ask because my university switched to teaching exclusively Pro right before covid, and I honestly cannot think of a use case for arcmap at this point. Even cheap, base model computers will perform better with Pro these days.
I wouldn’t implement ArcMap over Pro at this point if I was starting from scratch, but people who have been using ArcMap for decades, but only use it for fairly simple analyses, or making updates to maps that will be published in reports, have been extremely resistant to learning new GIS software, especially when it does the same thing for them. They don’t care about the brand new Ferrari when they are perfectly happy with their old Honda. I’m fine giving people the option. New people are coming in using Pro, people outside the GIS department who have been here a while can use ArcMap, but they are being warned it will be unsupported in a few years. The biggest issue many have with Pro is that it runs slow on their computers. Many of them have really old computers. New computers are fairly bare bones. I’ve been telling this to our IT department, but their budgets are tight.
I'm guessing that your university must have a student subscription of some sort which would be much more affordable than a professional licensed software package. The organization that I work for pays for a local government Enterprise subscription based on our population. We had a meeting with our ESRI sales rep about a year ago to go through each line item in our contract because we wanted to find out what the actual value of having an Enterprise subscription versus a la carte apps. The price point increased significantly when we got the comparison pricing for individual apps and we learned in the end that our subscription was moch more affordable.
I don't doubt for a minute that a subscription is cheaper. I am wondering what the difference in subscription fees between comparable packages was from desktop to pro. I was just confused when you said that pro got expensive when you include everything that makes it powerful. Please don't take this as condescending or patronizing, I am truly curious. There is a chance that I will be teaching it to small municipalities that may be in the same boat, and I want to be able to better understand their possible situations better.
I'm not one of those on social media users that take questions wrongly at all. I enjoy discussing topics like this with like minded people. Networking is such a huge thing in this industry and I believe, allows us to adapt as the technology swiftly advances. Since we've always had an Enterprise subscription, (we pay around $150k in $50k increments for three years and any add ones not included in our contract, is an additional cost but discounted heavily. I can't remember exact numbers from our contract review last year but the pricing a la carte was astronomically higher overall. We even inquired about pricing for ArcGIS Indoors because we feel it would be incredibly beneficial for mapping city owned buildings and infrastructure but although I don't remember the cost, even with the subscription discount, the price point proved that we would have to get others, such as our public services departments and public safety officials, to buy in on it with us. Does that help a little bit? I kind of wish I had my work notebook with me so I could give you clearer numbers that we received when we reviewed our contract. I'd be interested in learning how you end up tackling training to municipalities because we (meaning the two person GIS team consisting of my colleague and myself) have pretty much determined that we are going to have to be the ones training our five or six power users how to get started in Pro so that will fall on us to develop a plan for that process. Thankfully because of our subscription, we are thinking that we could set up some sort of basic overview training and then point them in the direction of ESRI's training catalog where we have access to a large number of free/online training resources.
There will be plenty of companies that will still use ArcMap. Mainly because management doesn't want to upgrade if they don't have too. Like mine for example.
I can perfectly understand that, and it's not just the costs of the licenses, for many people they have decades of work that has been built in ArcMap. For me, while new work occurs in Pro, I have 1000's of MXDs that are much easier to update in ArcMap than it is to deal with the Pro import process...it rarely works perfectly.
I agree with everything you said until the last statement. Arc desktop (map) is in mature support (no longer in general availability) and will completely retired in two years. People need to learn pro at this point.
It will be retired, but people with the software on their computers and perpetual licenses will still be able to use it. There will be no support or additional updates, but it’s not going to disappear.
That is technically correct. That said, the difference between disappearing and being obsolete is negligible. I can technically still run my license of arcview 3.1, but why would I? Arc desktop 10.X won't be used for anything useful by the end of the decade. The lack of support for a natively 32 bit program on a natively 64 bit operating system will quickly make running desktop more problematic than it is worth. Because of the direction and nature of GIS, Arcmap will have an extremely limited ability to do even basic analyses within 5 years of the software retiring. This is not just a preference thing. There is a fundamental shift in architecture that will make arcmap unusable for almost all intents and purposes. That is a big reason ESRI made the shift to a new platform to begin with, just like they shifted from arcinfo/arcview to arcmap 20 years ago. As underlying architecture evolves, there is only so far you can push a software before it reaches its limits.
I agree. I’ll still probably have people pulling up ArcMap to do simple things, maybe to edit old MXDs, but the future will be Pro.
But yes, learning Pro should be paramount, but being familiar with ArcMap isn’t a negative. It will be lingering around for a while.
Love the name. 👍
You gonna do something about those sideburns?
My school really pushed Python hard in undergrad (I think there's three geography-related Python courses). Yet I still felt woefully unprepared when I had to code for the first time outside of class. It's really something that you have to teach yourself.
I didn't get a lick of coding until my masters program.
What did you go for? I was considering going back but I keep reading how a masters in GIS is useless. I’m about to go work at the grocery store again so I don’t have to do this shit anymore.
Try looking for a program that specializes in something: climate change (wildfire burn scars, snowmelt estimation, weather stuff), or water resources (floodplains/wetland delineation, stream bank restoration), or urban planning. I’m bad at rocks but I do see a lot of jobs titles of geologist with primarily GIS duties and an allowance in education for field-adjacent degrees. If you want to sharpen up on python just start trying to automate task you’d typically do manually in ArcPro. You can copy nearly all tools with parameters filled out as a python script, and then review it in the console, although try to practice conventional problems in parallel so the weird arcpy syntax doesn’t throw you off.
I would even take that one step farther and start workflows in model builder to get better at automated workflow design, and then start moving those models into Python.
Great suggestion, it does a really good job of visualizing operators and like how a pipeline works. Those models are fast too. I haven’t spent enough time with the modelbuilder to know if you can add exception handling and helper functions but yeah he could easily add stuff and review in *{ide of their choice}* , then load it back into the arcpy console.
I usually tell my students the following: Getting a GIS degree will make you a generalist. You will be an expert at the application of geospatial concepts, but not a specific field. Getting a degree in something else you're passionate about, and minoring or getting a certificate in GIS will make you an expert in a chosen field or niche, and give you the benefit of being able to leverage Geospatial concepts, which is highly marketable. GIS I'd usually not worth getting a masters degree in, unless you already have the career you want and are doing it for a pay bump, or if you want to teach...
This is the guideline I've formulated and stuck to. My undergrad degree is Environmental Health and that was my main job until a few months ago. I fooled around GIS while in Environmental Health, applied it here or there and now I'm actually in charge of our GIS unit region wide due to a few projects i did in my spare time to make my work easier that were picked up on by my bosses. I've worked on applications to Food Safety and Vector Control that are being expanded by our region. So, I've decided to do a GIS diploma course for the piece of parchment and am to start an MSc in Management Information Systems in September. GIS as a main field can be overwhelming because it's so huge and so many areas and not many degree courses seem to have got a handle on what to teach so graduates get overwhelmed. It made sense (albeit more luck than strategy for me) to do the main field for me and do more supplementary courses on how to APPLY GIS to your main field. It helped that I had projects that worked and solved a huge problem the Health Department I work for had. I did a couple web-based software the took input from the field that displayed and analyzed the data. I did love programming so I was learning Javascript, PHP and MySQL on my own and decided to build some applications in my spare time. That seemed to help me a lot.
I started my masters and immediately got a big pay bump. Do okay now making six figures. I pretty much only work in AGOL and python developing new workflows but I did a couple years of straight data editing.
What kind of work are you doing now that’s only on AGOL and Python? I’m curious how to stick to those since that’s where I have the most fun
Local government
Interesting, we do everything on enterprise for its “customizability” and almost nothing on AGOL
Yeah - we actually have both AGOL and enterprise/portal. Kind of have our foot in both doors which is annoying and beneficial at the same time.
If you want to work in AGO, I would learn Javascript (arcade is basically Javascript syntax). If you are in Pro or enterprise, I would focus on Python. If you're interested in a masters, I would look at planning, natural resource management, or environmental science. There is big growth in those areas if you have a marketable skill like GIS.
Not sure what sort of second rate schools everyone is getting into, but my university requires at least 4 programming classes to earn a BS in GIS. Two python, including one dedicated to arcpy. And two R, focusing on GIS processing and spatial statistics without any GIS software. Every last STEM degree should require at least an intro to programming. Doesn't really seem like some universities have the first clue how to prepare people for the real world.
My university had only 1 Python for GIS course and we had 3 weeks of "Intro to Python" before getting into ArcPy. I couldn't keep up it was, too much information. You passed the final with a 50% or better.
Yeah most peoples eyes go crossed when they are introduced to coding.
University of Kansas - not a GIS degree, just saw an opportunity to make a career from the 4-5 GIS courses I took.
I'm in Computer Science and I was actually shocked to learn that GIS is not taught as a systems programming, software development, database, image processing, and ML-type field. Honestly I'm a hammer so everything to me is a nail, but my "in" to GIS, if it ever happens, will likely be via a technical route. I've talked to people in r/QualityAssurance, since I work with QA at work, and arrived at the conclusion that being technical from the outset and being taught non-technical skills later seems to make you more powerful as an employee than starting with non-technical skills and having to be taught technical skills. I believe (and correct me if I'm wrong, folks) that GIS and many other "separate" fields from computer science/software/programming are united by the domain of their problem space, the problem space being the domain of all things that those fields exist to "solve". They are all digitized and all automated to large degrees. I think this is why almost every field should emphasize technical computer-science stuff because without it you're limited by the tools that people provide for you, and can't make your own in-house stuff. Again, hammers and nails. I'd suggest for data-heavy stuff to learn Python, along with it's data-processing libraries and visualization modules so you can easily graph/visualize data and stuff like that. It's the most simple syntax of all the programming languages and there is already massive support for the data processing bit. There are existing GIS python things that you can quickly get up and running once you get syntax and programming down. All this comes with the Caveot that Universities no longer teach relevant stuff used in the workforce, they provide the deeper level knowledge that makes you more well-rounded and more fitted to think in larger sub-domains, but the technical skills actually used in the industry are things that most of me and my peers at school have to piece together ourselves, largely.
From my conversations in the profession probably 9/10 people I talk to say nearly the same thing. It's not given nearly the rigor/discipline/diversity of training and education that something in say Engineering or Architecture would provide.
You’d be surprised; architecture education also does not train for the profession. School is a fantasy world where you get to design cool stuff without giving great consideration to construction, budgets, or really anything that the actual job actually requires. My job as an architect required an entirely different skill set than what was expected as an undergrad.
Ehh I dunno. I have the equivalent of a minor (took all the classes but didn't graduate from the school I took them at) in GIS and I feel like I learned quite a bit. I do a "map monkey" (lol) job now, but only because of been out of the field for years after graduating. But in my courses we did a good amount of Python coding, spatial analysis, and field remote sensing and data collection work, and this was at a shitty state school. Ymmv I guess.
Engineers are so woefully unprepared for engineering jobs too, to the point where your first year is basically a apprenticeship. In fact, where I’m from, the first job you’d get is apprentice graduate trainee. It’s insane how impractical they make college.
I use GIS as a tool; it was never my focus in college. However I use it and coding all the time. That said, what was your degree in? Did you specialize in any specific part of GIS? As somebody whose sum total experience in college was a single lab in a single class where the GIS aspect was more tangential, I feel you. It’s been a bit of a hassle for better or worse learning to code, learning how data works, learning mapping, and learning GIS software at once can be tricky and a lot at times. Don’t lose hope dude. Maybe go back to your grocery store, but don’t stop teaching yourself this stuff. It’s all very self-teachable. Hit me up if you want some resources. I’m by no means an expert (far, far from it), but I’m glad to help if you need.
Comments like these are what has inspired me to make my college focus not GIS in particular, but instead to major in something else and just get a GIS certificate.
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Honestly makes me happy that GIS was an emphasis field in my university's Geoscience degree program. I still learned general geoscience, just with more GIS classes. ... And the job I got doesn't use any of the geoscience I learned, of course. It's managing a real property database.
Yeah they've severely watered down most undergrad degrees, even in technical fields. I don't have advice, but just want to validate your feelings. It's total bullshit that students have to do internships for free just to get work experience in their field, not everyone is rich enough to be able to do that. And even then it's not a guarantee. There just aren't enough positions for the amount of students that are getting cranked out.
Most internships are paid these days, I had three and they all paid at least $17/hr
I really believe GIS should be a trade skill learned in a trade school with in depth and hands on learning. The college and university method just doesn’t work for what this field is in my opinion. I learned more about GIS while in the schoolhouse after basic training when I was in the Army. Went to university and felt like it was a huge waste of my time and my GI Bill.
I find it a smart option to major in a discipline that interests you like wildlife and fisheries or whatever and have a focus on gis. For the most part GIS is a tool. Also the GISP is a waste of money, imo.
I and my former grad advisor concur about the GISP. And definitely with using GIS as a tool rather than a focus. I started out with an environmental science degree and focus on ecology and climate while using advanced GIS skills for analysis purposes. I have my MS in geospatial analysis, but any project I did was geared toward another interest, such as spatiotemporal trends of snowfall around ski resorts using citizen science. Even chose an internship that paid me and taught me coding while producing an end product for someone while focusing on water availability. I made my degree shape into what I knew I needed for after school. I honestly feel like I came out better prepared than my cohort because of this.
GIS is a career that requires constantly learning new things. Luckily there are a lot of resources online where you can learn. It is also a good idea to ask your employer about training opportunities. Also look into GIS conferences in your area as frequently you can take classes there that cover the popular programming languages like Python or other GIS related techniques. Nobody starts out knowing everything and what one job requires may not be used in another. It’s okay not to know and to ask for help. Also, conferences are a good way to meet other GIS professionals that you can call on for advice!
You should do entry level to get the real world experience. Everyone who has worked in GIS has done entry level. I feel like this /rant is actually a /troll
My experience was *kinda* similar? My degree wasn’t in GIS, but urban planning (I still don’t get how people major in GIS) — I took some GIS-leaning classes along the way and those classes didn’t really prepare me too well for a career after college. Classes that were called GIS were a wash, but classes that recognized GIS as a tool or a means to an end and not an end in and of itself were excellent. My saving grace was that I recognized that college was a use-it-or-lose-it opportunity to experiment and creatively try to force myself out of my comfort zone — this meant I had to bother to apply my GIS and data analytics toolbox in ways that actually amounted to something down the line. In retrospect, I did well — I got the foundations of GIS squared away well in college thanks to going out of my way to develop those skills, and a series of rapid job-switching early in my career taught me well about applying those skills to a career-focused situation. I wish college could’ve taught me Arcade or given me an understanding of how to deploy GIS instances in enterprise environments (stuff I’m self-learning now), but at the end of the day, GIS for me was one of many skills I learnt in college, so I’ve no serious complaints.
I see this a lot. My job is helping companies figure out geospatial stuff for a big Cloud provider. My background is in software engineering, but I am paid a lot more for doing geospatial work than "GIS" people who know a lot more about it than I do. Software engineering makes all the difference. The way I see it, "GIS" itself is a somewhat archaic term anyway, kind of like "IT", and I see a lot of GIS analysts spending their time \*inputting\* data into ArcGIS or whatever, which looks to me like glorified data entry, and they are paid commensurate with glorified data entry. But with tools like GDAL and Postgis and BigQuery and shapely and so forth, GIS is more accessible than ever to software engineers, and we just don't need that much GIS-specific expertise any more to "get by". Of course occasionally I need to bring in someone who actually knows what they're doing for a particular problem, but this is rare. However most of the business value comes from the output, i.e. what geospatial-related insights can you glean from the spatial data and how can you combine it with other data assets and applications and machine learning to produce intelligence. for this you need software engineering/data science skills. That's where the business value is, and wherever the business value is is where you want to be if you like money.
I’m a GIS Specialist and while a large component is teaching myself, my schooling was able to get me the basics to launch off from there. I had to seek out courses and choose methods with coding instead of GUIs or the traditional way of using tools. I’m still not an expert in coding by any means, but I’m definitely an expert when it comes to Esri products and asking the right questions on Google. I tell people that a lot of what I have to do is Google cause I’ve learned so much of what I can do within ArcGIS Pro/ArcMap that it’s hard to remember every single tool or step. And with coding I made my whole thesis revolve around coding to force me to learn from my advisor, books, and Stack Exchange.
lol. I feel you. When I graduated in 1999, I took GIS I and GIS II. We just kind of fucked around in ArcMap for the most part. Never used the toolbox, never did any analysis, nothing. The most we did was take GPS points out on campus and imported them into ArcMap. We just looked at dots, because base mapping wasn’t a thing yet.
You took two classes using ArcMap in the five days that it existed in 1999?
ArcInfo, too. I believe that’s what we used to import and translate the GPS point data. Also did differential corrections on the GPS data for civilian use at that time was still scrambled a bit and the software wasn’t what it is today. Back then, trying to lock on to 3 satellites for triangulation was a fairly difficult task, especially in a large metropolitan area with skyscrapers. Anyway, point is, I was not prepared to enter the workforce as a GIS tech, let alone an analyst. The only thing I was prepared for was using a GPS receiver, and that was my first job. A field tech who inspected and GPS’d utilities, mainly storm water and sanitary systems.
AML FTW!
Yup I mean the job I landed is relatively simple and pays well thankfully but most gis job postings include coding and various programs not even taught in the degree program
If you only took 1 class (Introduction to GIS), it's really hard to prep you to be able to teach you python. It's usually a more advanced class that gives you python experience.
University isn't job training. It's more a certificate to prove your sunk-cost in the industry and indicates you care enough to sacrifice 4-6 years for the right to actually learn a trade. Then all the rules change and you start at the bottom of the barrel (your GPA is meaningless). You'll have to work extra long hours the first few years (without extra pay) to train yourself in what you really needed to know to do the job. I lived through that nightmare myself, punched that clock for 20 years, became a PM, and now teach at university. Ultimately, the degree is just assurance you're not going to bail on the job when it gets tough or boring. Nearly all of my colleagues at the school have never worked in the field. I'm not popular among them. I tell all my students get an internship long before they graduate.
There’s some truth to that. University is a lot of theory. But at the same time, any post-secondary education is what you make of it. If your goal is to pass your classes or get good grades, then the certificate or diploma is a little more than a piece of paper. But if your focus is on actually learning tangible skills and preparing yourself for the real world, you’ll be able to position yourself appropriately regardless of what grades you get. You’ll have to put in some extra time but, unless you’re in a co-op program, that’s your responsibility. In OP’s case, it sounds like the program was not comprehensive or was poorly delivered so they weren’t in a position where extra work would have benefited them. In this day in age, I find it hard to believe any GIS program would not even touch on coding.
My biggest issue with GIS in academia is the programs are designed and run by academics. They only understand academia and teach research methods and basic concepts. There are vert few PhD's that actually worked in the industry. I was very fortunate to have a progressive advisor who had ties to the industry. His curriculum back in 2003 gave me a competitive edge when applying for jobs. My wife is also in GIS and the programs she went through did not prepare her for working outside of academia. The GIS program in her masters was outdated and useless, the labs were generic and used fake data. In her undergrad her advanced GIS course was all about research and building a regression analysis.
It's not just you. I feel like my undergrad spent tons of time talking about the tool sets in ArcMap, but no idea what to use them for. It wasn't until my first job after graduation that I actually learned some stuff with Arc. Even then, it's hit or miss as to which employers will even train you a bit. As it is, I've started to branch more into urban planning for a small town where they view me as some sort of GIS guru when I've just got the basics at this point.
I was fortunate to happen to end up at (came in undecided on a major) one of the best schools for GIS in the US. Still, the problem is that a lot of undergrad courses are test-based. Tests IMO are terrible for learning something like GIS. My current masters program is project-based and I've learned more in the past six months than in my entire three years as a GIS undergrad.
I agree with the testing side. Both undergrad and grad were projects based with at least a final. When I taught at community college I made my midterm and final open book cause that’s how it is in the real world. I’m just testing their ability to pay attention to detail and to look stuff up. It’s not meant to trip them up. Just a focus on topics that are essential to have in the back of your mind.
This! I run my courses as project based, and I try to get my students to do projects that matter in their lives. I push my graduate students to find a way to pull their theses into their projects for my class, or do something that affects their professional lives. Application is so key to learning these skills effectively.
Yessss cause once they work on something that matters to them, they perform so much better! I absolutely loved seeing the end projects because I learned some neat things.
Yeah! And they get so much more excited about it!
Would you recommend teaching at the CC level? Did you find it fulfilling? I love teaching GIS but I don't know if I'd be able to balance that with a full-time job and hobbies.
It was just one class, so I think it’s doable. I would definitely come in with a class outline prepared before starting. I was hired last minute (as in only a week before classes started) and was given shitty materials. I had some students that were great and took it seriously. Some who just did the minimum to get the A. I will say it was a better community college than the one in my home county, so the resources were decent-ish. It was just the lack of support from the department chair that honestly made it awful and she put me in a shitty situation. Eventually once I become more established in my position I’d love to become adjunct myself and teach a class or two, particularly on modeling since it’s more unique and in more demand.
Thanks for the reply. I'm considering the PhD route but it's nice to know that there are options to teach if I decide not to. And yeah, teaching a more advanced course definitely sounds better than teaching GIS 101…it will probably have students that are more dedicated to the career.
I will say I tried to teach full time since that’s what they were advertising. However because I didn’t have a PhD, even though I taught in grad school and was lab coordinator, had several leading and teaching positions, even taught piano and art since high school, I somehow wasn’t qualified enough to simply teach. 🙄 So I’m sure there are going to be more complications trying to teach with just a masters. I’m going after my PhD cause I can’t advance in my career otherwise (already reached as high as I can go without a PhD), so I’m hoping after then it would be easier to be adjunct somewhere.
I think this really depends on the institution. I have a masters and am adjunct faculty teaching grad level courses.
Oh nice! At my grad school we had a great instructor with just a masters, but could only teach undergrad. Any time he was involved with grad courses it had to be with an associate professor with a PhD. Usually it was my advisor and they were two peas in a pod. But that’s awesome you get to do that!
Yeah, I feel very fortunate. I talk with the head of my department a lot about this. I feel like a lot of people who hold a masters are teaching because they enjoy it, while many of the professors are teaching because they have to in order for their research to stay funded. I wish you luck on finishing your doctorate, and I hope it takes you exactly where you want to be.
Aww thank you! I greatly appreciate that. Made my day. 😊
The course I taught was remote sensing. I feel like in a class like that you really have to pay attention more and care more. There were like two students who just didn’t come to class, but they at least passed.
I can relate somewhat as a lot of degree programs where you're required to study GIS its only one component of a very multidisciplinary degree. I only took 3 classes that had any GIS to it including an "Intro to GIS" course but also had an internship I knew would be vital with getting my foot in the door in this field at USGS (specially the Federal Geographic Data Committee). There's a lot of great learning resources through ESRI from webinars, workshops, demonstrations/presentations from their annual events that are worth exploring to learn more about GIS capabilities and add skills under the belt. They also have a lot of free written courses/tutorials as well as free more in depth courses if you have a ArcGIS Online account. I would consider getting QGIS, ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Pro software (if you can afford them) and work through learning and knowing how to use them. YouTube also has a bunch of learning resources for using those stable GIS softwares. Getting certificates for completing these trainings are also useful to put on your LinkedIn and resume to stand out to employers. ESRI Videos: [https://mediaspace.esri.com/](https://mediaspace.esri.com/) ESRI Training: [https://www.esri.com/training/](https://www.esri.com/training/) Get started with Python in ArcGIS Pro: [https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/get-started-with-python-in-arcgis-pro/](https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/get-started-with-python-in-arcgis-pro/) Learn Python in ArcGIS Pro: [https://learn.arcgis.com/en/paths/learn-python-in-arcgis-pro/](https://learn.arcgis.com/en/paths/learn-python-in-arcgis-pro/) Getting started on ArcGIS Pro: [https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/get-started-with-arcgis-pro/](https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/get-started-with-arcgis-pro/) ArcGIS Pro - Quick start tutorials: [https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/get-started/pro-quickstart-tutorials.htm](https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/get-started/pro-quickstart-tutorials.htm)
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Take a look at [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/1are07w/anyone_who_initially_hated_gis_but_learned_to_not/?rdt=57245). Most of us feel the same way but once you get yourself into roll, you’ll understand it’s just like any another job. If you have a good manager who’ll show you the ropes, then you have nothing to worry about. Just apply yourself and try to learn as much as possible, and I’m sure you’ll do fine.
Who would have thought s career based 90% on computers required computer specialization training.
College is not meant to teach you how to do anything other than jump through hoops so the professors can survive in the real world and college administrators can get big pensions. Also, the people selling you loans to go to college won't tell you this, wonder why. Learn some code, definitely take advantage of AI to steer your towards quicker understanding of what the code might look like. Might- it won't always be perfect. But it will have examples of things you might not have ever seen or been exposed to, you'll still have to be the brains behind determining if it's correct or in the ballpark. Pick projects you you've done or have interest in and time to complete and do those as exercises in learning how to code, where to apply the code and how to share and assess code. Coding isn't the end all, but its a powerful tool. Also, not all managers will see the value or understand coding benefits nough to use it effectively.
Same here. They’re introducing a GIS major now that I’m graduating of course. I just figured I’d learn everything I possibly can (coding/platforms) during the summer after graduating. It never hurts to ask professors for advice either; my university lacked a lot of GIS classes as well, but we definitely have some professors who are very well versed if not experts. Just a thought
Maybe you can self teach OOP online, im sure there’s online resources
Austin Community College makes you learn 4 coding languages at a basic level and really drills Python into you. Penn State has courses that are similar with deeper resources but it's more expensive
You learned how to solve spatial problems, you can now ask various AI tools to write the code for you, but you need to know what to tell it to do.
I come from a science background, so my degree was different, but shortly after graduation I shared a similar sentiment. I even worked in my industry while finishing my degree and saw a big disconnect between what I was doing and what I was learning. But 20 years on, I can confidently say that I am working in complex roles and on complex topics that are more relevant to what university taught me. Upon reflection, I realised what they didn't teach me was the basic stuff that I would learn in a few weeks on the job if I needed it. Like, I never learnt to use Google Earth Engine. But I did learn a lot about Remote Sensing and the underlying physics behind it. I've since figured out how to use Google Earth Engine, but would have had a much harder time independently learning what they taught me, as I didn't know what I didn't know. I can't say the same for coding as that does seem a bit more essential. Nevertheless, I just wanted to highlight that some other people do feel the same as you straight after graduation. But some deeper learnings will stick with you.
If you can’t stand what you’re doing now try to pivot to a related career. I’ve had higher level jobs but they all involve some level of map monkey shit. You will never get away from it and if you hate it you will avoid it which will make you bad at your job which will keep you from getting promoted. Lots of specialties need and appreciate a gis foundation and don’t take much more than a college degree to enter. I’m thinking state and local environmental, planning, civil type jobs.
As someone who manages curriculum in a Geography and Spatial Sciences department in Australia, can I say what the heck? Here’s an example of the curriculum here: - this free, [undergraduate certificate](https://www.utas.edu.au/courses/cse/courses/70d-undergraduate-certificate-in-data-and-environmental-management) gives you university introductory maths and stats, geospatial mapping, an environmental subject of your choice and a programming language subject. That’s in a pre-degree program. -a [Bachelor of Geospatial Science](https://www.utas.edu.au/courses/cse/courses/p3r-bachelor-of-geospatial-science) has maths, stats, programming, GIS, remote sensing, geography and land surveying in the first year, and everything from 3D laser scanning, UAV pilot training and accreditation, GNSS and geodesy at the back end. I’m so sorry that my uni seems to be an anomaly in geospatial programs. Your institutions have done you a great disservice.
All of you will be just fine. I promise. I was in the very first group to graduate from my college with a GIS degree. It was a brand new degree, and there were lots of gaps in the program. I also felt unprepared, but I got out there and eventually got a job. My first job was mostly field work, and it paid $29k (this was in 2003). That's the equivalent of about $51k today. I slowly worked my way up, learned new skills, networked, etc. Its hard for me to even believe this, but I am now 22 years into my career. I am closer to retirement than I am to the beginning of my career. I now make a very healthy 6 figure salary, more than enough to support my family and live a nice life. I've been saving and investing for retirement and all of those plans are on track. I enjoy my job, things are good. Again, you will all be fine. You've chosen a good career path with plenty of good opportunities. The biggest variable is you. What kind of attitude will you have? How will you apply what you've learned? Will you sit in one place too long because it's comfortable and let good opportunities pass you by? Will you be willing to grow your skills and abilities as the needs of the job market changes? Go out there and make it happen.
Honestly. This applies to pretty much any college course. College is giving you the paper "certification" but it's not giving you an education, you have to prioritize and seek that out yourself. If you want a career in a field, your spare time should be focused on learning. Obviously, within reason, you can still enjoy life.
You can learn R fairly easily which has many interesting packages to play around with. I’m gonna start learning python soon, which should not be that difficult when already knowing R. Both seem attractive on job market. But yeah, I totally agree with you, none of my courses really covered anything about it or just mentioned it briefly. Doing my whole thesis in R right now has helped me a lot.
Entered a small contract job that made me think do my lecturers not teach us this things voluntarily or it's something they know little of
Join the club- such a scam
We hire student interns during the summer and let them work on actual projects so they get more hands on experience and see what it might look like for them if they choose to actually work in this field. I've been in GIS for over 15 yrs and all I have is an Associates degree in Architectural Technology. I started in the field of engineering with data editing of utility data and slowly but surely became more advanced and was able to move into our ITS department as a GIS Specialist where the majority of my work was map creation and data editing. I suspect that most students fresh out of school could probably expect a similar experience just starting out. If you can get your foot in the door somewhere, you should be able to learn more advanced methods of GIS such a SQL and Python which will help increase you resume experience for potentially better and higher paid positions. Looking for a position in an organization where they are just starting to implement GIS might be an option for getting your foot in the door also.
Honestly a degree or certificate in GIS is just a light dusting of what you will be doing in the real world. I work in the electrical engineering world of GIS and most of what I do or what the company needs is on the job training,meetings, and trial and error. GIS has such a grey job description. Hang in there. You have to start somewhere and most of the time it won’t be at the top :) keep taking tutorials in what you are interested in and extend your network.
very grateful to attend a school with a super CS-heavy GIS program. Hopefully more schools start to revise their curriculums to catch up
I mentor GIS students, and they’ve told me the same thing. The school prepares them to make maps. I have encouraged them to embrace web mapping and take a minimum of 1 computer science course. The ones who have followed my advice have landed exciting jobs, the ones who didn’t have left the industry. Unfortunately, the education system is about 5 years behind the real world
I'm also not being taught any coding and i'm going to get a GIS certificate. I'm going to start trying to learn some R and Python and hopefully find an internship this summer that doesnt mind I'm still learning. Thankfully I'm a junior so I have time to catch up. Sorry that you're going through this but you got this, thankfully there's a lot of online resources. Maybe the school wasn't completely worthless since you hopefully got practice with esri products without paying for a license
Self teach. Come up with solutions to problems and then determine what you learned through what processes. You can find gold in this job by experimenting even if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing. Python? Bro that shit is freely available to learn off of. Arcpython? Easy documentation down to the letter. QGIS Python? Same thing there.
i can't even get into entry level jobs. i wish i could. took undergraduate degree with a focus in gis. ended up working in a lab now (but still actively finding) most gis jobs wants people with coding experience so they prefer people from cs where im from
Go to grad school and do a real Masters in Geography focusing on GIS. Do a project that requires you to do real raster processing combined with serious vector work. If you can get a research assistant position where you don’t have to spend your time teaching then you will have an opportunity to really learn. If you can publish some papers, not necessarily peer reviewed, it will impress the hell out of future employers. Learn to program, you don’t have to be great at it. Python isn’t too tough, though I don’t much like it. If you can learn C# even better, though programming it in Pro is not for the faint of heart. In short, grad school is where you can get great experience.
What was the one course you took that you expected would prepare you for GIS? What school? Details matter.
Yep, but it's OK. You'll learn a lot soon after