This is seriously an awesome resource for any emerging professional in the GIS world!
As an emerging pro myself - here are a few things to add as you are trying to launch your GIS career, particularly for portfolios and work samples.
- Use your school (and maybe internship work) as work examples! While these may be more focused on a specific research project or paper, learning about how to use GIS, navigating failures, and showing your work process is a great example of how you can apply those skills to anything in GIS.
- Find a way to talk about GIS to someone who doesn't know what it is. For me, I like to say GIS is like baking (sounds crazy, right?). Being able to relate GIS to something people understand makes it easy to talk about something you enjoy
- Be unconventional! If you don't have a lot of professional content for a portfolio, create something! If you are fortunate enough to be able to have an ArcGIS Online account, make a survey123 and web app for your hobbies (good fishing spots, favorite ski hills, best trivia nights, see my example here!). Make StoryMaps of your travels with pictures, and create PDF maps of places you like just for fun (bonus if you do a fun theme like Tolkien!). Doing this allows you to be creative and enjoy GIS, but can teach you a new part of the program, and how you might apply something like this to a future job. I know we are in an Esri form here, but if you don't have access to Esri products, do some research about open-source ways to accomplish these things.
Happy Mapping!
