Careers in GIS

At the New Zealand Esri User Conference 2022 during the Growing GIS People session, we launched a new industry initiative entitled Careers in GIS. The central idea for this initiative is to enable the community to have a Hub that sells GIS as a Career to people who fall into four main personas:

• School students – targeting juniors at high school who are trying to make their subject choices but also seniors who are trying to decide what courses to take at a tertiary provider
• Graduates – targeting early talent, people just finishing their tertiary education study and looking to launch into the workforce, could include links to organisations’ intern and graduate programmes.
• Career Changers – information for people who are looking to change their career after being in the workforce for some time
• Volunteers – people looking to get some work experience in GIS or just wanting to make a difference in their communities using GIS, this information might include links to volunteer organisations that use GIS e.g. GIC

The personas would be prominently displayed on the front page of the hub and each persona would have a subpage with content to help that persona progress. For example, the school student sub page might have some of the following:

• Videos of people talking about what they do in their job and how they use GIS as part of that job
• Recommendations on what subjects to study at school and tertiary education providers
• Links to tertiary education providers who have GIS papers or programmes

The Careers in GIS hub would be hosted by Eagle Technology, but we envision the NZ Esri User Community would be contributing to the content of the hub.

Call to action – at NZEUC 2022 we asked people to submit their name via the following survey123 form and add a comment around how they would like to help with this initiative. We are now extending this call to action to the wider NZ Esri User Community. So please submit your details and ideas about how you can contribute here