GIS in Higher Education: Realities and Opportunities

What skills do you need for a successful GIS career? That was the underlying question we discussed in our presentation GIS in Higher Education: Realities and Opportunities at the Spring 2015 NEARC at UMass Amherst on 11 May 2015. Here are a few (selected) results based on our simple survey of the conference attendees:

• Many folks learned the GIS skill most important for their daily work during their undergraduate and/or graduate degree. In other words: what we teach actually matters!
• Many folks learned the GIS skill most important for their job on their own somehow. In other words: being a lifelong learner is critical for success as a GIS professional. Now, how do you teach that?

Then we discussed what that single most important GIS skill is and the two pictures below summarize our completely unscientific analysis. It seems that big-picture skills such as problem solving and analysis are (in general) more important than narrow technical skills such as ModelBuilder, etc.

I see two connected implications here: Let's focus less on the specific tools and skills when we teach our GIS courses and instead focus more on encouraging big-picture 'habits of mind'. At the same time I would hope that the GIS profession would emphasize those when writing job ads as opposed to requiring expertise in some specific tools.

For more information you can have a look at our presentation and explore A GIS Career, Want a GIS Job? (Part 1), and Want a GIS Job? (Part 2).