10 Pieces of Career Advice
I hope the following 10 pieces of career advice will be helpful to you as you blaze your own pathway in the field of geotechnologies. Why listen to me? My advice comes from the over 400 universities and colleges that I have visited over multiple decades, listening to the needs and challenges of students, faculty, and others in education (deans, provosts, facility managers, admissions officers, career counselors), creating and giving hundreds of courses, workshops, and presentations annually, and my background of work in all 4 major sectors of society (private industry, government, academia, and nonprofit organizations).
However, these 10 pieces of advice are certainly not the only ones that you should pay attention to. Like you in the YPN community, I am a lifelong learner and actively seek mentors and collaborators.
1) Network
We live in a world where society, technology, and education are simultaneously changing, a world where the sphere of what is known is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. Such a world means we cannot be an expert at every single thing, or even more than a few things.
Gather colleagues that can help you in your journey, including those who are in fields that are not your own. Also remember to give back to the community as well.
Use LinkedIn and other tools but make sure you seek opportunities to gather face to face. When you gather with colleagues, don’t just ask them for technical advice, but also about their experiences, what they are reading, what their biggest challenges are.
The YPN Networking space on Esri Community is another space to engage in networking in an online format.
2) Gain Content Knowledge
Technical skills are, to be sure, important. However, don’t neglect developing content knowledge. One or more areas of domain expertise, such as land use planning, demographic analysis, energy, water, natural hazards, or something else, will be important in your career pathway. Even at a tech company such as Esri, we don't want just people who know GIS, but who can apply GIS to an important societal domain or sector.
3) Understand Foundations
In geotechnology, foundations include measurement systems, spatial analysis, relationships, cartographic methods, geodesy, and more. Don’t just gain theoretical knowledge of geotechnologies, but know when, where, and how to use the GIS tools—how to select optimal sites, georegister imagery, classify data sets, and so on. As more people who don't have a GIS background begin to use some GIS tools, this is an area where you, as someone who understands the foundations and knows the tools, can show real leadership: Sharing what you know with those who are mapping but who are outside the GIS field.
4) Think Critically
In our information-saturated world, it is more important than ever to think critically about the questions you pose, about a problem, about your methods of solving a problem, and about data—including and dare I say, especially mapped data. How can you evaluate whether the spatial data will be suitable for your needs? Who created it, how was it created, how often is it updated, at what scale was it created, what are its sources, and other questions are important in our era where anyone can create and share maps and map layers. Critical thinkers are what we need to solve the complex problems that are global in scope and increasingly affect our everyday lives. These include human health, natural hazards, climate, political instability, habitat loss, supply chain management, and many more.
5) Read
One of the books I've written is entitled Interpreting Our World—100 Discoveries that Revolutionized Geography. This book confirmed what I had suspected—that all of the revolutionary thinkers over the centuries, down to our present time, were voracious readers.
Read as a way of engaging with people at a conference; it's a great icebreaker: “What are you reading right now that is interesting?" Reading also keeps you thinking creatively and broadly. Read things in your own field to bolster your skills and foundations, but also outside of your own field. Read a variety of genres—poetry, novels—not just nonfiction. Read new books and don’t neglect ancient ones. Busy? Your local public library most likely have free audio apps that open up audio books and e-books to you to read on-the-go.
6) Write
You have many platforms at your fingertips—self publishing book avenues, blogs, articles, chapters, and more. Writing helps you become more articulate, helps you in public speaking venues, and opens you up to network (see tip #1 above) as people encounter your writing.
The Esri YPN Community is a great place to begin your writing contribution. Create a post on the YPN Networking space or simply comment on existing blogs.
When writing for journals and publishers, make sure you have your “thick skin” on—be prepared for criticism of your style, methods, and conclusion. Criticism will help you grow.
7) Get Outside
I have authored numerous essays and videos about the value of outdoor experiences. These experiences help you think, step back, and refocus. They encourage you to use all 5 senses. They encourage you to develop your sense of place—think of all the art, songs, poems, and novels inspired by our human connections to space and place.
Getting outside helps you nurture Earth stewardship: This is the only planet we have! It is excellent to be able to study places with vector and raster data in our GIS, but that’s no substitute for getting out onto the landscape. I remember examining a large volume of spatial data before my first trip to Costa Rica, for example. I gained head knowledge of the biodiversity of plants, landscapes, and animal life there, but it wasn’t until I was on the ground, teaching a group of educators about GIS, and seeing that within 1 square meter of where I was standing, there were 5 species of plants, 3 types of moths, 3 different types of tiny frogs—"oh, so that’s what biodiversity really looks like!"
One of my favorite research works supporting this encouragement to getting outside is Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods. Louv’s admonition is that if people aren’t getting outside when they are young, they will not have an Earth ethic when they get their future position as the director of a state natural resources agency, for example. They may be technically proficient and a good communicator, but they may not, deep down, truly care about the Earth. Louv also says to nurture this ethic, make sure you get beyond soccer fields and other constructed spaces into the riparian zones, seashores, and other wild places.
Part of the goal of getting outside is thinking holistically – that the biosphere is connected to the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the lithosphere, and the anthroposphere (the human sphere). Holistic thinking is essential to solve the world’s problems because those problems span many disciplines: Environmental science, geography, hydrography, civil engineering, health sciences, sociology, demography, and many more.
😎Ask Questions
This is the first step in the scientific and geographic inquiry process. Ask many questions, deep questions, thoughtful questions. Ask questions that your professor is not even asking you to ask! In the workplace, ask questions that even your team lead or supervisor is not asking you! Such employees are highly valued in the workplace.
You may have been curious as a toddler but somehow along the way, part of that may have been lost. Get it back! Even though you might not have been encouraged in your primary and secondary school to ask questions, except on an exam, but being curious about the world is a lifelong skill to nurture.
Asking questions will help you solve our world’s problems. It helps you develop tenacity in working with any toolset, including GIS, to work through whatever problem you are trying to solve. And considering tip #1, network with inquisitive people who model what good questioning looks and sounds like.
The YPN Questions space in Esri Community is a great place to ask questions and respond to others.
9) Think Spatially
Most of our 21st Century issues have a spatial component. Thus, to solve these issues requires you to be a spatial thinker. The most important tool is not one inside a GIS software toolset, but your own brain. Nurture that tool and keep it moving forward. The National Research Council’s report Learning to Think Spatially was instrumental in helping people to consider the importance of spatial thinking throughout education. GIS can be a key tool in fostering spatial thinking, as it focuses on analyzing and modeling change over space and time.
My own definition of spatial thinking is from a practical, applied, standpoint, so it may be better thought of as geospatial thinking: Identifying, analyzing, and understanding the location, scale, patterns, and trends of the geographic and temporal relationships among data, phenomena, and issues.
10) Consider GIS as a platform
GIS is not just learning version x of software y. GIS has evolved into an interconnected set of tools that allows you to collect data, process data, map data, analyze the patterns that emerge from mapping that data, modeling and evaluating spatial relationships, and communicating the results of your research using web mapping applications and via other means.
Be a well-rounded person that embraces this notion of GIS as a platform by immersing yourself periodically into each component of these tools: Collect data in the field; start with creating a Survey123 and collecting data into your own survey (as I did here with walkability). Make a map from your data and then a dashboard.
Use spatial analytical tools to create, for example, a set of intersects, mean centers, or standard deviational ellipses from your data (keeping in mind that you need to choose the appropriate types of tools that make sense on the type of data you are analyzing). Fold the survey, map, and dashboard, and the resulting analysis layers, into a story map.
A portion of this advice is available in video form, here:
I look forward to your thoughts and reactions.
--Joseph Kerski