This year is a very important year for me: I am officially a blogger for RPLS.com, and
I’ll soon be graduating college and finding an employer that I will work for over the next
several years consistently—a very big thing when going back and forth between school
and internships. Like my peers, I am very excited to be entering the surveying profession,
even in a time of poor economic performance. This is because people are getting to
understand their worlds in a spatial way as more and more detailed maps become publicly
available. As more people begin to use spatial data, the need for surveying will grow.
A strong argument for this need was highlighted last year when Google started two
(or more) small wars because their boundaries were off. Last month, the small town
of Beebe, Ark., solved their sudden bird problem with the help of aerial surveying.
Surveyors are the original creators of that information, and graduates like me are among
the newest breed of surveyor. It should be a very exciting time as new technologies and
sources of funding become available in our day-to-day jobs.
My question to you is: What should those jobs be? The knowledge base a degree covers
is a lot more than land surveying. Few businesses, for many reasons, have participated
in all the aspects of the profession. When graduates take a job at the best companies
they can find, should they apply their new ideas and skills to help develop those firms,
or should they take what instruction they are given and earn a PLS before trying to
implement their knowledge in the real world?
What are you, the established professional, looking for from the next generation of
surveyors as we enter the profession?
