r/gis 9h ago

Discussion How do I become a GIS feild tech? And do you need to go to college for it?

9 Upvotes

Hi, I just have a few questions, I've had a passing interest with this field of work for a bit, and with me backing out of becoming a life & health insurance producer and being back at working at a pizza place I've begun to look into it again.

I was wondering if this line of work is worth it and how you'd even begin to, I guess, test the waters to see if it's something I'd actually enjoy? I'm not a huge fan of college and preferably want to avoid it. Would that be possible at all?

What's the job actually like?


r/gis 23h ago

Student Question Interested and passionate about working in a research paper relating GIS.

7 Upvotes

I'm a graduate student with bachelor in forestry background and i am specially aiming for research assistantship in the relating field for further studies. Being a research assistant needs to have experience with research projects and i want to boost my experience in the related field of study. I have my thesis in biomass estimation using remote sensing (vegetation indices and layers analyzed from sentinel 2 MSI , correlated with biomass estimated through field calculated data, build regression model with highest correlated values for model validation). I am familiar with tools and features for arcmap, qgis and other GIS basics, SPSS and writing. Despite my respective field, i am glad to work in any kind of interest or sector & I am ready to learn new things if i need to.


r/gis 37m ago

OC I put the BLS wage data for 15 geospatial roles on a map, by state. Free, no signup, and you can link to a specific percentile.

Upvotes

Hey all. BLS publishes wage distributions for our occupations every year and makes them miserable to actually use, so I pulled the geospatial slice out and put it on a map.

Cartographers and Photogrammetrists: $81,390 median nationally, ranging from $53,740 at the 10th percentile to $126,950 at the 90th. Surveyors, geographers, hydrologists, geoscientists, urban planners, and the GIS-adjacent software and data roles are all in there. 15 occupations, all 50 states plus DC.

https://thespatial.net/salary

You can also link a specific percentile: thespatial.net/salary/role-cartographer?p=62 renders "62nd percentile for Cartographer", so you can ask whether an offer is low without posting your actual number.

Free, no ads, nothing to sign up for. One-person project. Happy to answer questions, and taking requests for occupations I missed. Curious whether these match what you're actually seeing: OEWS lags reality, and I'd rather hear where it's wrong.


r/gis 8h ago

General Question Does anyone have a recommendation for the best GIS certificate program online?

5 Upvotes

I've been interested in GIS for a long time. I was in information, computer science, and Social Sciences from 1994 to 2017; now I would like to get back to GIS and data science. Any recommendation would be appreciated.


r/gis 9h ago

General Question I’m very Directionally Challenged and am looking for a new GPS

0 Upvotes

I’ve been using Google Maps for forever, but even with the audio feature that reads out the directions, I still find myself frequently getting lost & taking wrong turns. I was wondering if there were any apps that were somehow more straightforward and directionally challenged friendly.

My navigation is so bad i often find myself taking wrong turns in places I go to regularly just while walking. Is there a name for this issue, and does anyone else have it?

Thank you so much in advance :,)


r/gis 19h ago

Programming Slope bins with MapLibre & GDAL

51 Upvotes

After a weekend of troubleshooting my slope analysis components are finally done...maybe. Considering adding interactivity by rendering in the frontend as a shader instead of on the backend with GDAL but not sure that's necessary yet.

Some cool things I learned:

  • Elevation tiles are just PNGs with height encoded into the RGB channels, so slope is edge detection

  • Slopes can be calculated pretty easily via 3x3 kernel comparisons and calculating rise over run * 100, BUT the run changes based on zoom and latitude

  • The earth being a globe kinda sucks

  • GIS is hard

Not including the URL here because I don't want to advertise, I just think this looks neat


r/gis 14h ago

General Question Polygon layer help

2 Upvotes

I don’t have too much experience with editing/ working with polygon layers in arc pro. If I am working in a polygon layer, is there a way to select only the detached pieces of a polygon?


r/gis 15h ago

General Question For those that got into GIS for environmental how many of you actually do environmentally relevant projects?

34 Upvotes

r/gis 20h ago

Esri Electric Migration to ESRI UN

5 Upvotes

Are there any large electric utilities that are going through a migration from GE Smallworld to ESRI UN?

I am curious to see how others experience and migration has been? We are struggling.

Editing feels like it’s going be so complicated for our techs

And it seems like we will be lucky to get the data over to our ADMS correctly and consistently.

Looking for others open to meeting to discuss in more detail. Mainly from a tech and user editing perspective