GIS Jobs: too many or not enough?... & spatial women... also skilled immigration?

[NathanHeazlewood]

Are there issues with the GIS employment market?

In the past few weeks I have had discussions with some recent graduates (and also a few older geospatial people) who said that there is a lot of competition for GIS jobs, while at the same time some employers are saying that they can't attract the right job candidates. At first glance this doesn't make much sense- so I became intrigued about the underlying issues.

If the comments above are both true then there is an imbalance of 'employer demand' against 'employee supply’. This does not indicate a healthy GIS employment market. This is particularly surprising given that there is plenty of evidence that the geospatial industry is growing, so I had thought that there should be more than enough jobs to go around.

A related consideration: is there is an equitable distribution of jobs, pay and progression opportunities across genders and across minority groups. I became interested about the proportion of males to females in the industry and whether this is changing.

My thoughts and research into this can be found below- including some original analysis from conference attendances:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141022053852-64183500-gis-jobs-too-many-or-not-enough-spati...

[JamesPierce]

This is long past the original posting of this question, but I cannot speak to the amount of jobs posted out there, but rather the content of the job postings.  The postings are often vague, especially by the recruiting folks.  I find that they often do not know anything about the job or job type they are recruiting for and automatically assume everyone is a programmer.

To that, I also find that when postings are detailed, the employer is often shooting for the moon and is looking for a candidate that does not exist in the real world.  "I want someone who is heavily skilled in programming languages, an excellent cartographer, a Master of GIS administration, a people person, leader.....and has 3-5 yrs experience."  My budget is small you know.......

For me, that was the most frustrating part of looking for employment near the end of 2014.