neaRThings A spatial doodle

Compassing It

11 Feb 2017

Still Looking ?

GIS Specialist

I am in the habit of Googling “GIS” job openings, first in my province of residence and then nationally. CareerJet and Gumtree are my go-to places. CareerJet is particularly good in that it aggregates posts from several job sites. Job Insecurity? ~ far from it! I like to know how my industry is doing, job wise, and also just to check how employable and relevant I still am, a check against having decanted skills and a way of identifying areas of personal improvement. During this insightful ‘pass-time’ activity I couldn’t help notice one particular job that persistently appeared in my searches, albeit evidently being re-posted , for more than 1 year!

Well, as usual you may ~ Cut To The Chase.

Yardsticking

For the particular job above, I felt I was comfortable enough with the requisite skills to dive in. In some areas I wasn’t 100% confident but was sure I could learn on the job in no time (if the prospective employer had such time. But looking at 1 year of advertising? ~ the solution they had in place was good enough for now and could afford to wait before migrating it. Anyway…). I hit upon the idea of preparing myself as if I was to take such a job. As a spin off I decided to aggregate ten “GIS” jobs within South Africa I thought were cool and get a sense of what was commonly being sought.

Add to it, during the beginning of the year I had come across a great post on what an Entrepreneur was and that an individual should be one at their workplace. This was going to be my aim in 2017. I was off to a good start with How Do I Get Started In Data Science from which I had also taken a hint on doing ‘job analysis’. So this year I would list skills I wanted to develop and improve on and work on these through the year. My quick list;

  • Improve on my SQL chops . . .SpatialSQL.
  • Improve on JavaScript . . . for WebMapping
  • Learn Python . . .for scripting.
  • Dig a little deeper into PostGRES (..and PostGIS) Admin
  • Play more with an online web GeoServer on Digital Ocean or OpenShift.

So I’ll see how that compared with what the market required.

Compassing It

GIS Jobs are variedly titled! For the same tasks and job description you find different banners in use. During this ‘pseudo’ job hunt I quickly discovered that GIS Developers were in demand. I ignored the curiosity to find out more and focus on what I was sure was comfortable with. Just avoiding the small voice in the head saying ‘You must learn software engineering, have some software development experience, learn Java, master algorithm design….’.STOP! The search string for all jobs was simply “GIS”.

I chose the following job postings for the exercise.

  1. GIS Specialist
  2. GIS Engineer
  3. GIS Fascilitator/Manager
  4. Head GIS and Survey
  5. Senior GIS Specialist
  6. Senior GIS Analyst
  7. GIS Business Analyst
  8. GIS Specialist
  9. Economic Development and GIS Data Quality Researcher
  10. Business Analyst (GIS)

A Play On Words

To complete the exercise, I aggregated all the text used in the above job posts (skippping stuff like email your CV to..blah blah). The aim was to have a sense of responsibilities given and skills sought.

I plugged the combined text from the ten job posts and plugged them into Word ItOut for a word cloud. Why? The thing just looks nice doesn’t it? Seriously. As an aside I figured the larger sized words mean that they appears more often ~ viz is what potential employees are looking for in candidates. After the first run I found some not so useful words appearing often. I pre-processed the combined text - removing words like - South Africa, Salary, City,…I finally ended up with:

My text from job posts had 1051 words. With a minimum frequency of 5 words, 95 words were displayed on the word cloud.

All Words Count

GIS Job Word Cloud

For overkill I also created a 10 word ‘summary’

10 Word Cloud

GIS Job Word Cloud 10

Last Word

Interestingly, the technical terms are obviated by words like team, development, support e.t.c. SQL doesn’t feature as I guessed it would. Development and experience are dominant. Employers must be looking for persons with systems/ procedures setup skills (Skills is mentioned significantly too!). These positions are likely non entry level kind, requiring experience. For now I’ll stick to my quick list above for skills development and give less weight to results from this exercise.

#postscript

  • This surely is not the best way to do a trend analysis of job requirements. I figure something that crawls the web and scraps job sites by South Africa domain names is the way to go. The method used here is rudimentary and creates a cool word cloud graphic to paste on some wall.
  • Results from this exercise didn’t produce the Wow! Effect one would get from a visualisation. It wasn’t what I expected at all. The black box spewed something off what I expected. To see that SQL didn’t make it to the word cloud? Where is database?

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