Yours Spatially

"A sampling of the job titles advertised in just the past month alone in some of the popular GIS career boards:

GIS Analyst - provide technical support to the organization's Geographic Information System (GIS). Generally requires a min. Bachelors degree or a diploma in GIS and can offer a salary that ranges from $30k - $50k... a huge range!

GIS Specialist - a BA/BS degree and 5 years experience in GIS with demonstrated ability to design, develop, maintain, and present spatial data for various projects using a specific platform.

GIS Manager - Requires a Bachelor's degree in GIS, Geography, Civil Engineering, Urban Planning, Information Systems or a field requiring GIS coursework (up to 60k)

Senior GIS developer - A minimum of 5 years professional Information Technology experience with a minimum of 3 year of hands-on experience as a developer. The "senior" typically pushes this job over the $50k range in salary

IT Director - responsible for the design, development and maintenance of an information technology. With "director" in the title look for a $70k+ salary

GIS Technician - Assists GIS staff, Bachelor's degree in geography, cartography, GIS, or closely related field with emphasis on GIS for spatial analysis and mapping applications (typically paid by in an hourly rate like $15 hr)

GIS Coordinator - Manages the Geographic Information System (GIS)/Mapping function for a company or government agency. Typically requires a Bachelor's degree + and will normally offer salary in the $50-$60k range

Mapping Analyst - Analyst will support the analysis, production, and presentation of geographic data. Often pays similar to a technician and will require a bachelors degree

GIS Data Steward - assists the GIS Data Manager in developing strategies, processes, and environments supporting spatial data access, management, and integration. Will pay nicely at $60-$90k and requires BSc heavy on computer programing.

Other commonly seen job titles that focus on GIS experience:
- sales rep.
- GIS IT specialist
- GIS marketing manager
- product engineer
- sales manager
- software developer
- web programmer
- IMS manager
- Geospatial analyst
- GIS biologist
- GIS production manager
- inside sales rep

Technicians and analysts are likely the positions in highest demand, however, there is also a large range in salaries and expectations. Some positions are advertised with a salary as meagre as $12 per hour and may require a B.Sc, 5+ years of experience and much more, others may simply demad a proven track record and will offer a salary in the $60k range.

Some keys to getting the big bucks. Be heavy on programming skills, have 10+ years of practical and relevant experience, be willing to relocate, have managerial skills, be a leader, be fluent in the latest technologies (AJAX, Oracle, SQL, yadayada). Titles with the terms, intern, technician, entry level, etc... may often require 5+ years of experience and a min. BA degree but typically only offer a pay rate of $12 hour or max $30k. Looking for a nice payday? Keep an eye open for buzzwords like director, coordinator, manager in the title... but beware as you should have a masters degree, loads of project management experience, and 10+ years of related experience. To help justify your experience see about getting certified as a GISP or other "professional". A question to you... have you ever had your resume and skill set queried and verified? As an employer you should always try to verify some of the information provided by applicants prior to hiring them - easily done with a couple of phone calls.

" We've learned a lot in the last 2+ years building software at Telligent. One of the biggest lessons we've learned is one we didn't really anticipate: a shift from caring less about the underlying technology to how our software solves the user's problem. It's a subtle change, but as an ISV this is probably one of the bigger "maturing" steps a software organization has to go through. You can tell when an ISV hasn't made this transition yet: the literature and announcements about their releases focus 100% on the underlying technology instead of how the software solves a particular set of problems for the people that use it.

If you had asked me 2 years ago about what we wanted Community Server to become the answer I would have, and likely had, given would be something involving: Provider Design Pattern, Server Controls, SQL Server, etc. In other words, I'd tell you about all the cool technology we were using and how we were using it. Today the answer is very different - in fact internally we judge our own success when customers use our software because of the problems it solves, not because of the technology it is built with.

For example, have you ever bought a car because of where the steel was made or because of the brand of the engine? A few people care about these things, but most people care more about: does the car drive good, are the seats comfortable, etc. Make no mistake about it: as developers we're .NET through-and-through, but we have yet to have a customer choose our solutions simply because we wrote "good" code; although we still like to think we do that too

Today we're in the midst of building 5 new products and our philosophy is: (1) build it as quickly as we can (2) start using it as soon as possible (3) make it simple. Two years ago the phlosophy would have been: make it scalable, make it extensible, etc. Bottom line - If we had started these new projects 2 years ago I don't think they would ever be completed. Now I get worried when I sit in a design review and hear someone say, "we want to make it scalable and extensible". To me that translates to: "We don't know or understand our customer or the problems we are trying to solve, so we'll try to do everything in v1.0."

Are we doing some cool things with the underlying technology? Absolutely! But first and foremost we're going to build software that solves the problems. One of our new products is a CRM system which we started using internally about 4 weeks ago. Our goals today are things like, "the user doesn't have to take their hands off the keyboard to create a case" or "creating a new contact should have no more than 2 required fields". We're not using the provider design pattern, we're not supporting multiple databases, we're using dynamic SQL, we're doing tons of code generation - in other words, we're building software that solves the problems first. We'll solve those other problems too, but we'll solve them later as the software evolves and matures. "