Tips to Land Your First GIS Job

hey what's up everyone in this video i wanted to share a few tips and tricks for landing your first job in the gis industry i've been working in this industry for about five or six years now and it's a pretty cool industry it's a niche tech feel that you can get into and i'm a fan of it as a career path so i figured i would just share a few tips a few things that i did i think that helped me land my first job so i've got my trusty notebook over here with a few tips written down and we're just going to go through these and we'll talk about them very briefly i want to keep this relatively short but the first tip is obviously no you're going to need to know the basics of gis so you're going to need to know things like what select by location is select by attribute you know raster versus vector data a shape file a file geodatabase you're going to need to know you're going to be have to be able to succinctly define gis so you're going to have to pretend you're trying to explain gis to someone who has no idea what it is and what i usually like to do is i like to say it's working with uh data that has a spatial component to it so normally if you think of like normal normal tabular data like a csv file of say like businesses for example businesses in the us you just have a huge list of businesses but the moment you add a location a piece of information that describes the location like the latitude longitude then all of a sudden you're able to map this data onto a map and visualize it and you start to see trends um you know trends and patterns and that's that really gets at the root of what gis actually is and how powerful it can be so yeah just try to come up with your own definition of gis don't try to memorize something just come up with something in your head that makes sense um yeah also just know what gis stands for geographic information systems but yeah i'll just leave the rest up to you just know the basics of gis and that's tip number one tip number two is have a portfolio so when i graduated college i had a website i still have my website actually and it's a very simple html static website that just has links to some of the projects that i did in college that were related to gis and they were literally just pictures like they weren't it wasn't a web application it was just like a picture of something i'd like a map that i produced with arcmap or something and just have that up on the website put it on your resume i think that really helps you stand out if you like put your website address up at the header of your resume next to where your name and address is most recruiters don't they're not used to seeing like a website on someone's resume so i think when they see that it um helps you stand out a little bit and yeah i mean i can definitely make videos on how to um come up with a simple portfolio if if there's people interested i know you're probably not trying to be a web developer so it's still just a good skill to have and the basics of web development it's it's not too too hard um also you want to have like a github i would recommend so i have a github even if you're not a developer just throw up just open an account so you can you know use that account to link places to like put on a portfolio and maybe just add like a few gis related documents things like that so yeah just have like a presence online that would be my next uh well that it's the same tip actually but just you know be out there online um step three is you want to learn both esri and open source software so you want to focus if you if you're lucky enough and you have access to ezra products you want to know arcmap and arcgis pro these days you could probably get away with not even learning arcmap since that's being outdated it's being uh what's the word like sun setted they're going to stop supporting it really soon so just focus on arcgis pro i'm pretty sure they have free trials of it so you can work with that and also work with qgis so don't neglect the open source solutions um you can learn all the same concepts with something like qgis and i use that all the time um so yeah just be familiar with both of them because there's different companies that use some of them use both some of them use only esri some of them use only open source i've worked at all all those combinations of places so you're always going to run into into that stuff so yeah just that would be my next tip is be familiar with both of those and for the for the purpose of your first job out of college i would say just focus on the desktop software so you don't need to learn arcgis enterprise you don't need to learn geo server or postgres or any database stuff just really work on the desktop and that's going to help you get like a geospatial technician slash analyst role and from there you can build on your skills and move into analyst slash developer or engineer or something like that next step here is learn python so even if you don't want to be a developer i would recommend learning the basics of python it's something you can put on your resume and companies love to see that you know how to work with python so that's where the github portfolio comes in just whatever you learn so watch some tutorials watch some of my tutorials and put some of that code on github and then you can point people into your in your interviews you can point them to your github where you have code python of you doing stuff i think that helps a lot so that would be just very beneficial and python has helped me a lot in my career it's helped me get promotions make more money and all that stuff and just learn um it's given me the opportunity to work on cooler projects basically uh so i would highly recommend it um and the next step is just be patient so it took me like six months after graduating college to get my first job partly on me i didn't have any internships had a pretty bad gpa and i graduated in december instead of like may slash june when most college seniors graduate so it's kind of a weird time to look for a job but yeah just keep applying i applied to a bunch of different places and finally one of them was interested and you know it took a while going back and forth negotiating but eventually i was able to get the job and that's it those are my basic tips for landing your first position in the gis industry so um hope that was helpful i'm planning to make more videos like this i want to do another video similar but how you can get your first gis developer job i think i'll work on something like that but yeah if you have any questions or comments just leave them in the comment section and i will answer them as best as i can and uh yeah thanks for watching

Channel: franchyze923

Views: 333

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: gis, arcgis, arcgis pro, esri, arcmap, qgis, gdal, ogr, first job, collge, internship, geospatial, gis interview, software, software engineering, geospatial technician, geospatial analyst, geospatial developer, geospatial engineer, python, arcpy, geoserver, postgres, postgis, postgresql, geographic information systems, geographic information system, geographic information systems careers, gis job, gis careers, gis tips

Id: lL4Dry0f3Ag

Length: 6min 46sec (406 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021