GIS Life: Navigating Career Change

[JesseCloutier]

Sooner or later, we all experience change. Maybe you've recently moved to a new organization or stepped into a leadership role at your workplace. Perhaps your job is the same, but you're approaching your work in a new way. Whether chosen or unexpected, transitions like these can lead to fresh perspectives, new challenges, and opportunities for growth.

We want to hear about a significant career transition you've experienced in your GIS journey. What prompted the change? Were there difficulties to overcome? What lessons did you learn as a result?

Share some details in the comments below! If anyone in Esri Community provided support that's helped you make this change, be sure to tag them so they know the impact they've had.

[JesseCloutier]

I’ll share a memory of my own to start things off. Back in 2022, an Esri recruiter reached out to me because the Esri Community team was looking for a Community Manager for this online community. I had related experience leading a team overseeing large social media communities for a B2C company. When the recruiter told me that Esri was a GIS company, funnily enough I had to say: "I don’t actually know what GIS is."

That was the start of my GIS journey.

Of course, it turned out I did have some sense for what GIS was. I just had never heard the terms “GIS” or “Geographic Information Systems” used in daily life before. Examples they provided quickly connected the dots for me—a big one being the Johns Hopkins Covid-19 map so many of us saw repeatedly as an information resource throughout the pandemic, and which ran on ArcGIS.

It’s no spoiler that I did take the job with the Esri Community team where I get to work alongside generous, smart colleagues who support efforts that in many cases make an enormous difference in the world. Beyond getting to help maintain and grow Esri Community as a location where GIS professionals around the globe collaborate, find answers to questions, and share enhancement ideas that improve Esri software, I also work closely with my teammate @BriannaEttley to tell the stories of our members who use ArcGIS and this Community to achieve all kinds of meaningful outcomes across industries. Getting to learn from your stories is one of my favorite parts of this job and every one of them deepens my understanding of how GIS impacts our lives!