Esri Community Member Spotlight: Hussam Al Jabri
This monthly series of member spotlights features you and your peers here in Esri Community—the people playing a role in finding solutions, sharing ideas, and collaborating to solve problems with GIS. We’re doing this to recognize amazing user contributions, to example how Esri Community’s purpose is being brought to life, and to bring depth to this group of incredible people who may never meet in person, but who benefit from each other’s generous expertise.
A Foundation of Career Support
Hussam Al Jabri (@Hussam_AlJabri) is a GIS Lead with a large city infrastructure building company in Saudi Arabia, where he focuses on the business’s electric distribution tier. In this work, Hussam brings with him over a decade of GIS experience that has earned several awards that include being named an Esri Electric GIS Hero in 2022 and, in a prior role, helping lead a team that received a prestigious 2021 Special Achievements in GIS (SAG) Award.
“… my first destination is Esri Community, where I can find my peers
to share my challenge with them and they support and help me. ”
Hussam is equipped with another key resource he’s eager to advocate for—one that’s made an ever-increasing difference in the latter half of his GIS career.
“… basically, the Esri Community was the key for me in my career path to develop my skills in the products themselves, like [ArcGIS] Survey123.” Hussam shared in an interview while attending Esri User Conference 2023.
Hussam poses at an Esri Community advertisement while attending User Conference 2023
When it comes to what drives him to regularly return to Esri Community, Hussam makes clear the benefits it continues to supply.
“So, where I found challenges—many challenges in my career, my day-to-day works—my first destination is Esri Community, where I can find my peers to share my challenge with them and they support me and help me.”
He later continued the thought, “Esri Community is helping me a lot with getting insights, engaging with people there … They are active, super active there and I found this is the most important things that make this community the first destination [for] me.”
Lifelong Community
Hussam is notably humble about his accomplishments, which go on to include being one of just three individuals recognized as a 2020 Esri Community Rookie of the Year for his high degree of involvement on the platform. For him, awards and recognition aren’t a goal, but a side-effect of his real mission: to improve his GIS abilities and develop richer expertise. Hussam pairs this with a motivation to contribute to a better world.
He remarked on the rapid advancements he and other GIS professionals must adapt to today, “[GIS] technology is evolv[ing] crazily. So, it's keeping me continuously learning and the learning itself is growing me up. Continuously. So, my passion is—it's like unstoppable, I can say—because of the technology itself. It's unstoppable for making the world better. So, I want to ensure that I'm on the track to contribute of making this kind of world. Peaceful world, sustainable world.”
“… I think I will be in the [Esri] Community for all my life. ”
Many of the greatest challenges to achieving that peaceful, sustainable world Hussam and so many others strive for are becoming steadily more pronounced and in need of solutions that GIS can play a role in solving. To do that, ArcGIS technology will continue to pursue greater capabilities and the need for GIS professionals to be able to rapidly connect and collaborate with each other will only increase.
Hussam reflected on his experience with having access to that type of connection through Esri Community and summed up its long-term value, “So yeah, I think I will be in the [Esri] Community for all my life. Even if I grow to the—like a senior management level—I will be engaged there with more insights in that field.”
Hussam Al Jabri is a GIS Lead focused on electric distribution at a large infrastructure building company in Saudi Arabia. Hussam has won and contributed to several notable awards, including Esri Electric GIS Hero in 2022 and a prestigious Special Achievements in GIS (SAG) Award in 2021. He’s also received recognition for his exceptional involvement in Esri Community, which he regularly turns to as a top resource for assistance and collaboration with GIS peers.
