|
|
| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
| |
| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | [gislist] RE: GIS education/degree |
| Date: |
02/14/2005 08:50:01 PM |
| From: |
The Geissmans |
|
|
I know some quite proficient engineers is aerospace and software
who learned engineering through apprenticeships, starting as
teenagers. That is certainly rare now and these guys are senior
citizens, but it shows that an engineer can be trained on the job.
The people I am thinking of are Brits, and their employers had
senior engineers involved in their training and also sent them to
various schools to acquire specific skills. What they missed was
the other parts of what is termed a liberal education -- foreign language,
Western civ, etc., that are intended to mold an "educated person"
rather than give specific job skills. That seems not to be valued as
much these days.
From the other side, I got the liberal education in geography back
before GIS existed -- GIS was just McHarg's first book and SYMAP
-- and then went into software engineering that had no geographic side,
Space Shuttle flight software. With software engineering just recently
discovered, nobody had much of a head start, so we all picked it up
along the way, coming from a wide variety of academic backgrounds,
sharing an informal kind of apprenticeship. It was exciting being in
the midst of a lot of bright people who wanted to master this
discipline.
IMHO the key to SW engineering is for the company to have
practices in place, rather than expecting new arrivals already to know
how things should be done. Basic principles, but not concrete
practices, which are specific to the organization.** There is a place for
people who have training in a specific tool (I wish we had someone in
our group who who knows how to tame our particular mapping engine)
to achieve specific results quickly without fuss, and I don't know that
the rest of their background matters too much. But in my work, that
involves AI support of banking, it's mostly software engineering and
data exploration, although the data has a strong spatial element. I
wish we had someone with a GIS background in the specific tool,
because times where we have to thrash around and figure out how
to do it would be simple for the GIS expert. In that job, the person
would need to grow the GIS expert's role, by showing how his or her
skills expand the capabilities. That would require maturity and some
salesmanship as well as technical competence. Are those taught?
Another consideration is how much the employer feels the work can
be subject to Taylorism. If that's how they feel, then they may only
be interested in pure skills for narrow tasks, and outsource rather
than hire somebody anyway. In that regard, it may be safer not to
develop repeatable engineering procedures and let every project be
the result of magic. (I don't know whether that remark applies to
GIS.)
** I suspect this is more relevant to the care and feeding of production
systems that contain embedded GIS or locational functions of some sort,
and/or mapping (e.g., Mapquest, our automated valuation system, a package
delivery company, the telephone company, county assessor data search),
than an agency responding to disasters, etc., or doing one-off research
where GIS manipulations are central to the activity. Is that the case?
Jim
a mortgage bank
_______________________________________________
gislist mailing list
gislist@lists.geocomm.com
http://lists.geocomm.com/mailman/listinfo/gislist
_________________________________
This list is brought to you by
The GeoCommunity
http://www.geocomm.com/
Get Access to the latest GIS & Geospatial Industry RFPs and bids
http://www.geobids.com
|
|
Sponsored by:
For information
regarding
advertising rates
Click Here!
|
