Anyone work with GIS?

Yeah, if I had had my head on all the way I would have done the cert program before I finished up at Davis. But I did take the intro class at UCD and use it for work... In fact I just finished up a map of the South Fork of the American River Trail today. Hiked it last friday with a GPS. Love those days at "work"

 

So what is your actual job title?

 

"GIS Specialist" "Data Management"... The company I was working for got bought out this last august... the entire office got laid off, i'm now doing some web development things and survey help with a new job and i'll eventually be bringing GIS into this new jobs available services.

 

Yep. Use ESRI everyday

 

What's everyone think about getting a minor vs a certificate in GIS?
And can anyone recommend any schools that offer online GIS degrees?

 

Doubt you're going to find online simply due to the cost of the software (makes AutoCAD look cheap). You can get a 90-day demo version of ArcGIS for free... it's a HUGE download. Took me several hours to download it on my city network, and then took another 2 hours to run the install.
Then there's the map resources needed. Out of the box, ArcGIS is just a blank CAD program. There's no samples to work with.

Degree or cert... depends on what you're doing now and what you intend to do. The cert is probably adequate for 75% of users.

 

I fundamentally and profoundly disagree with gis certificates and minors in gis. In my own opinion vast majority of companies that require some knowledge of gis have very little exposure to it and have little to no understanding the level of technicality that lies behind gis tools.

ESRI offers a 24 hour course that gives an introduction to their software. ESRI also offers hundreds of hours of training that expand knowledge of their software but understanding fundamentals requires a lot more than just learning how to use ArcMap.

Case in point. Degree in Geography requires about 136 credits educating a student in everything from political aspects of geography to reading maps and understanding cartography in general. Those building blocks will be a base from which you grow your skills. Instead of running tools (flinging you know what at the walls and hoping it sticks) you will know why you were running those tools and what to expect as a result and how to remedy issues that may arise. Most certificate programs barely let you dip your feet into the water and yes you can have that fancy "GIS" added to your resume but when push comes to shove you sit there staring at the screen for hours and hours with a deer in the headlights look.

At work we have close to hundred gis users not counting dedicated gis department. Yes we have engineers using gis and accountants using gis and shipping and receiving using gis and administrative people using gis and tree huggers using gis and I can keep going and going... but the undeniable truth to it all is that 95% of them have no idea what they are clicking and thankfully they know where to draw the line and ask us for help and the 5% work in their own little world for weeks only to find that everything that they did was so severely flawed that it requires one of us to spend another week fixing. Just the other day I had to run a topology on a 500 acre project only to find that it has 1,800 acres worth of land use slapped on top of each other and someone was running tables using those numbers. Gaps, overlaps, boundaries that do not match... I can keep venting... but you know what the underlying issue was? The person was using load and append without having a single clue about what those tools do.

Whatever choices you make, be very vigilant of the fact that you can use gis as a user or an actual gis professional. Latter requires not just certificates.

 

I won't disagree with that.
That was the basis behind my comment that the certs are enough for 75% of users.
The majority of users are just that. They normally wear another hat, and GIS is one of their tools. At my city, we have 4 or 5 guys in the IT department that are the GIS guys. That's all they do, 40 hours a week.
We probably have more than 75 people using the databases (and few have change access to anything outside of their own projects, like our guy working our communications fiber can not make any changes to streets and sewers.)

If your goal is to make a full time job/career out of GIS, then absolutely, a degree is the minimum required.

 

Just going to copy this from my other thread for you GIS geeks..


Hey everyone,
I'm not sure if you are following the recent news with the Malaysia flight 370 has "disappeared" under suspicious circumstances, but here is a way you can help look for it.. Or clues regarding the incident.
It's an organization called Tomnod.
http://www.tomnod.com/nod/challenge/...ource=malaysia

Open that link up and it will explain everything, but essentially you are looking at satellite imagery (Sometimes not very good because of light unfortunately) and looking for things like oil slicks, wreckage, and maybe the actual plane. Get to tagging! You might be the one to spot it..