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Hi, you may remember me from other threads, such as "anyone in 3d visualisation" and "what the ****" to do with my life?".
Anyway, the other area I am interested in is GIS, so if anyone has any experiences, advice to share, I would love to hear them.
Unfortunately, I have little experience in this field, other than using digital mapping software at work and doing A-line geography at school and as my minor at uni (which were both a long time ago, now).
Cheers
Use Google to search this forum, there were a couple of threads on this in the last year
I work as a geospatial analyst but got into GIS entirely by accident. I don't have any formal qualifications so can't advise there either. So not enormously helpful I'm afraid!
I did a distance learning masters with UNIGIS and then promptly changed jobs and haven't touched a GIS since.
A-line geography
Is that to do with finding your way around women's skirts?
Get QGIS, get lots of OS Opendata, get lots of ONS opendata play with it a lot.
I do a lot of GIS work in my job, although all self taught. I write code to process maps and associated data for planning radio networks. I generally find most GIS tools don't do quite what I want so just write my own. It's a very varied field, at one end you could spend a lifetime getting lost in the maths of all the projections and at the other you need never understand them and just play with data in something like Mapinfo....
I'm a geographer, but my engagement with GIS is knowing how to export stuff from ArcGIS to Illustrator, and using base maps in a a kind of lo-fi cartography. There's probably going be demand for GIS folk as the smart city movement accelerates. Knowing how to do quantitative analysis and programming of some sort would help too if this is the direction you want to go. Similarly, as more people are convinced about big data, pulling out the geographical elements of the data will see more demand for GIS skills.
Another point. Learning how to use a GIS and understanding geospatial data and its processing are two very different things.
I've been GISsing since 2006. If you do a search I've written some thoughts on a previous similar thread which should come up. There's many facets to it from just colouring in to developing web services and apps.
You could do a masters degree. I did one at Edinburgh. It was great. I'd say you'll find it hard to get a job in gis if you dont have some sort of training.
That was my thinking StS. The only problem there is that most masters seem to require previous qualifications or experience in GIS.
I worked in that field till I got made redundant.
There was a good article on Linkedin that gave a good perspective on things:
[url= https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/geospatial-careers-12-things-ive-learned-so-far-thierry-gregorius ]https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/geospatial-careers-12-things-ive-learned-so-far-thierry-gregorius[/url]
There was a good article on Linkedin that gave a good perspective on things:
I'd say that was pretty generic advice about any discipline, he just uses GIS as a case study.
seems to contradict itself a bit that article!
Yeah, I noticed that. FF is correct too.