Feeling stuck in GIS? Level up using these 8 tips!

feeling stuck don't know where to go next with the geospatial career or feeling a little bit burnt out don't worry you've come to the right place in this video we're going to talk about how you can advance or get back into a geospatial career by advancing and learning new tools skills and different things that you can use in your career on a day-to-day basis now this is actually a continuation of another video that I did on the reality of being a GIS analyst if you haven't checked that video out you can see that over here um so I'd start there then come back to this one later so let's jump in I've split my recommendations into four different groups the first is technical the second is looking at why I or the width of your skill set the third is looking at deepening your different skills in different areas and the third are some general recommendations that I would recommend for just about anyone in geospatial so let's start with the technical skills I'm sure if you've seen any of my videos you know what I'm going to say here that's right learning and adding new technical skills specifically spatial SQL and python are two things that can not only help Advance your career but also help you increase your salary as you can see with some of the data here now learning these languages there's a few different approaches you can take you can jump into some generic books or courses on these different topics but definitely defin recommend checking out some of these resources here obviously I have a book on spatial SQL you can check that out I go deep into all these different topics around everything with just learning basic SQL into really Advanced spatial SQL as for python there's a lot of Great Courses here uh that you can see on the screen I'm going to list them all it's links below so you can go ahead and grab those but I definitely think having some base introductions to these skill sets so you kind of understand the Core Concepts then applying them to spatial is a good way to go because you're always going to have to go back and learn or understand those fundamental aspects to really carry that forward for Ward in either of these languages now I can tell you from experience I did this in a very backwards way with JavaScript I tried to just learn what I needed to learn and not understand the fundamentals and eventually you're going to get to a point where you have to go back and do that so uh recommend starting with the basics and then going forward from there the second technical skill that you can learn is actually understanding how the Technologies you're using work as it were under the hood right if you're coming from a traditional GIS background you're generally using like a desktop toolkit that may connect to some web services but you may not know what goes on with all the things under under the hood from a technical perspective so let's take a very basic analysis to take a look at uh maybe creating some points with buffers and intersecting those with some other points counting the points in those resulting buffer polygons now no matter if you use a desktop tool like arcgis Pro or qgis you generally know you have to create the buffer and then you're doing that intersection but what does that look like from a more technical perspective now of course you can do this with python and SQL and here's what that model might look like I built this out in qgs model builder just so you can get a sense of what that looks like like if you're looking for to learn more about qjs check this video out over here but basically you know what's going to go on now how you do that in SQL and python there's actually different ways to do this but actually understanding how that code assembles and which way to run it is really helpful to understand what's happening there and how to run it more effectively for example you might create the buffers in your desktop toolkit but there's actually functions in SQL to do this by just measuring the distance which make them all the much faster so there's simple things like that that you can learn and understand how that works and no matter what area you're working in you can apply these same Concepts to raster imagery you can apply it to geocoding dress work literally anything you can do you can find how those work technically under the hood so that will help you translate those skills that you've learned in the desktop environment into a more technical environment and help you progress that much faster so that covers the section around the technical skills of course there's more we could talk about but I wanted to move into the depth section and adding deeper skills to your tool kit now one that I think is really common in geospatial is the concept of certifications now there's number of different certifications you can get from places like ezri udmi online learning platforms like corsera and many many more that you can actually apply to and then use those learning programs to achieve that certification and in fact some jobs will require some level of certification so depending on the work you want to go in getting those certifications is a really good skill but beside that I actually recommend taking a look at certifications outside of geospatial things like if you want to work in a cloud environment AWS Google Cloud Azure all these different Cloud environments offer certifications for you to showcase your skills and are very helpful when applying to jobs in different areas on the flip side if you're looking to move into more leadership or communication skills plenty of platforms like corsera and others offer these certificates that you can go for and learn and actually try those out I have a partnership with corsera if you want to check out some of my favorite geospatial courses or any course in general take a look at the link in the comments and you can go ahead and check those out now it's not to say that you need a certification for these things you can certainly take the courses and learn the skills but once in a while I like you know having the actual certification to show that I actually did the work can completed the course to do that the second bit is actually about writing now I know that writing is a core skill for literally about anything these days even with the Advent of generative AI but actually writing and expressing what you're doing in your analysis can be really helpful to explain what you're trying to accomplish what you're trying to study and things like that and I know for a long time in my career I didn't really write as much as I did early in college or writing papers and stuff like that this is more than just practicing your writing this is actually a great way to Showcase your ideas if that's to potential employers or peers or anything like that you can turn them into presentations to share or you can actually just share them online with places like LinkedIn or any other social platform I noticed a lot more people doing this I've kind of created a video to talk about how you can do that but I think this is a great way to Showcase your work and not only just show the map itself but actually talk about what you're trying to do and and ultimately why you did it I think it's a good skill for anyone to have so going deep on those topics you really care about from a writing perspective and a certification perspective can really help jump start your career now when you look at widening your skill set that means adding extra things to your skills or really looking into other areas and that's the first thing I want to talk about was actually applying your geospatial skills in different areas that you normally wouldn't do so let's say you're working as a GIS analyst in a government setting for your local municipality you may be doing a lot of maintaining of data creating some web maps and things like that but maybe taking that and applying it out to something else like Environmental Studies or looking at other factors in different areas and doing some of that extra work to expand your skills will actually help you learn something else you may need to pick up some skills around remote sensing you made me to check out some different skills around using different toolkits and things like that so not only does it help you expand your geospatial skills but you also have to gain some subject matter knowledge around the topic you want to study this is great to also go into things that you really care about if you're an outdoors Enthusiast if you're really interested in sports if you're interested in uh travel anything like that can really help you focus in those different areas so take your core tools that you're using on a regular basis and apply it to some fun projects to actually kind of widen your skill set and then using those skills to actually bolster your portfolio which we'll talk about in a minute and also expanding into other job opportunities is a really great way just to try out some different things without having a huge tun of commitment now of course doing projects is all fun and good but ultimately you may want to earn some income from those different projects and you can actually do this with a number of different freelancing platforms there's a lot of different platforms to do this you can use Fiverr upwork things like that or just find other people that you want to connect with that may need that type of help maybe a local business or something like that to actually put your skills into practice ice pick up a little extra money on the side and kind of apply that side hustle to what you're trying to do there's definitely great ways to do that and you have a valuable skill set don't ever forget that and make sure you're applying it to other things that you want to do in practice and well get paid for the skills you're putting out there now the last two categories are kind of for anybody doing anything I would recommend this to anyone in geospatial the first is build your portfolio now I don't think you have to overdo this sometimes simple as best here are some examples of really good portfolios I like you just kind of have to Showcase your best work and also talk about it if you're have a Blog feature or something like that you can put your writing there you can put it on a platform like medium your portfolio can really be anything it doesn't have to be a website with your url or your name or anything like that but really try to put it and direct the message that you want to put out there make sure that when someone comes to that page the first thing they're seeing is I get that you do this if that's Earth observation if that's spatial analytics if that's building web Maps whatever that is that's the first message that someone should get that by the first few seconds they look at your portfolio so actually putting your skills into practice practice in building some sample projects is one of the best ways to actually utilize your portfolio finding those projects in different topic areas that you really care about like I just mentioned before or some of those sidew work things that you did in addition to your core work is a really good way to do that now of course sometimes you may or may not be able to Showcase things from your actual work so filling your portfolio with these other items is a great way to get started to do that now these are some really high level recommendations how you put these into practice is really up to you I would recommend taking a few different steps to try and go throw these different routes But ultimately you ing your career depends on adding more skills in different areas more knowledge in different areas and then showcasing that to the world so no matter what you do doing those few things together is the core of what you need to do so I hope you like this video If you enjoyed it please like it and subscribe if that always helps with this YouTube algorithm that we are all working on um if you have any questions drop those in the comments and I will see you next time

Channel: Matt Forrest

Views: 3,235

Keywords: gis, data science, spatial data science, spatial data analysis, geospatial, modern gis, matt forrest, spatial analysis, gis analyst, python, python gis, open source, arcgis, esri, qgis, cloud native, aws, google cloud, snowflake, geo news, geo, geo headlines, what is gis, google earth engine, learn python, earth observation, gis analyst day in the life, gis career, gis degree, learn gis, gis jobs, learn qgis, qgis tutorial, gis tutorial, gis tutorial for beginners

Id: N0Pp9sBz8LE

Length: 8min 50sec (530 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 14 2024