Reply To: Industry Requirements

[Diana Sinton]

Hi Senthil.  Probably you’ll find more ideas and suggestions from other LinkedIn groups, as you noted, and other sources of professionally-related information.  It really depends on what you want to do after your student years, whether you want to work directly with GIS as a career or you are learning GIS as needed to do something else (be a biologist that will be interpreting spatial patterns, for example).

Here is a fairly recent posting on the topic of GIS Skills, for example.   From the educational perspective, different programs aim to align themselves with different types of GIS-related learning outcomes.  Some programs strive to align directly with the Dept of Labor’s Geospatial Technology Competency Model, like this one at Salt Lake Community College.   Meanwhile, many programs follow content within the GIS & T Body of Knowledge as they design their curriculum, and this is a very broad collection of “knowledge” that is needed within a lot of different industries.  So there’s no one answer to your question.

You might find this article interesting, Skills in Professional Geography: An Assessment of Workforce Needs and Expectations Solem et al., 2008,, Professional Geographer).   It’s not only about GIS, but I think it describes important ideas for anyone expecting to do work that is geography-related.