How many Licensed Surveyors is enough?

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Joined: 06/30/10

How many Licensed Surveyors is enough?

Posted by Tony Garmon on Aug 24, 2010 1:00 pm

I keep reading articles about how the surveying industry does not have enough new applicants getting licensed in surveying. They also warn about the problems that will occur in our profession if this continues. My questions to them is how many surveyors does a state need? Lets look at Georgia for example. Georgia has 1385 licensed surveyors. How many does it need? 2000? 5000? 10000? There is not enough work right now for the existing surveyors, how will having more help? If the small number of surveyors could handle the housing bubble of the 90's and 2000's, I think they can handle the amount of work (or lack there of) in the near future.

I also hear about how half of the surveyors are over 60. Well, surveying is a field where most continue to work until they can now longer physically or mentally handle everyday tasks. For many surveyors that day will come when they have their last heart beat. I am 32 and hope to survey until I die and know many surveyors that feel the same way. If half of the surveyors are over 60, than the other half will be under 60, and when they are over 60, others will be under 60.

To rap this post up, I am sick of the fear tactic articles trying to put a time frame on the death of land surveying as a profession and how the lack of younger licensed surveyors is helping to cause it. I for one believe that an over population of surveyors will do more harm to the profession. When surveyors get so busy that they and their competitors are turning down work, than we can start worrying about not having enough surveyors.

Sorry for the quick rant, but I just needed to get it out of my system.

Don Poole

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Joined: 04/06/10

Re: How many Licensed Surveyors is enough?

Posted by Don Poole on Aug 24, 2010 1:41 pm

Tony, in my small town of about 11,000 year round folks we have 4 land surveyors working full time. One is a medium sized engineering firm, and the other three, including me, are small operations. The neighboring town has 5 engineering firms working full time, more or less. We all cover Cape Cod and the Islands and portions of south eastern Mass.

I have been listening to the cry of " no new surveyors are coming in to the profession" for the last 30 years and still have not felt an impact of a shortage.

How many is enough? Only the market can answer that question.

Don Poole PLS
Outermost Land Survey, Inc.

"Outstanding in the field"

Pin Cushion

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Joined: 06/07/10

Re: How many Licensed Surveyors is enough?

Posted by Pin Cushion on Aug 24, 2010 2:03 pm

There is no shortage of surveyors anywhere... the dipshits that wrote "we are in need of more surveyors" were misinformed.

Ken Paul

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Joined: 07/02/10

Re: How many Licensed Surveyors is enough?

Posted by Ken Paul on Aug 24, 2010 3:52 pm

As I imagine is happening everywhere, all of the survey firms in my area have significantly downsized over the last two years and are struggling to keep busy. I realize this will not last forever, but it is going to be a long slow climb back to stability.

On the subject of this thread, perhaps this apparently nationwide call for concern over not enough surveyors is the wrong question. I have long thought we would be better served if the focus was on a few other subjects, such as:

Evolving/adapting the profession, maybe the even the definition of the profession, in the face of every changing and advancing meausurment and mapping technologies.  When is it Surveying? What is the definition of topographic mapping and when does it require an LS? Machine control? DTM's? For just a few examples?

Education. How do we insure future surveyors understand the technology they are using? Where are they going to learn how a least squares adjustment actually works, and how it works compared to a transit rule or compass rule? Coordinate transformations? GPS to state plane, GPS to local, what are the different methods of transformations and when to use what?   Error analysis and adjustment with both GPS and total station data? The technology is too complex to learn from on the job training anymore. If we just push the buttons and get the answers, without fully understanding how we got them, who are we to say everyone else can't push those same buttons?

For a short anecdote, several years ago at a local association chapter meeting we had a law enfocement guest. His presentation was the use of a total station for mapping traffic accident and crime scenes. A couple of his statements have stuck with me. The first was, they were not surveying as they were not measuring nearly as accurately as surveyors do. A bit later he was describing how they used the total station to measure bullet entry and exit holes on the walls of a crime scene to determine the location of the shooter.  The questions I have always had after that are 1. Who exactly determines what accuracy level constitutes surveying? 2. Is not measuring the location of skid marks, guard rails, overpasses, signposts etc, in relationship to each other topograhpic surveying?; 3. How do you state you are not measuring accurately enough for it to be called surveying on the one hand, then state you are measuring bullet holes to within a few milimeters on the other?

Okay, hopefully just food for thought. IMHO, it is not quantity, but quality, and what exactly is our profession? Or, what do we want it to be? Now and in the future.

billhart

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Joined: 04/29/10

Re: How many Licensed Surveyors is enough?

Posted by billhart on Aug 24, 2010 11:43 pm

How accurately something is measured is not relevant to the question of whether it is surveying. The question should be whether the person doing the measuring has the training to do a satisfactory job of measuring and interpretation for whatever is the purpose of the measurements. The regulations should not be in terms of what someone can or cannot do, but rather the qualifications/license needed to certify a document for particular purposes.

Traditionally, the only aspect that was licensed was boundary determination, which is less about measurement than training to judge various kinds of evidence in accordance with the applicable current and historical requirements on land boundaries. Elevation certificates were added to the regulated list. Some jurisdictions have added additional types of measurement to the definition. I think it is a mistake to lump construction layout, topo, DTM, and boundary surveying all under one license.

The problem with new people is not how many are entering the profession, as the market will tend to regulate that. Perhaps a larger problem is that current technology discourages large survey parties where someone can get mentoring, and that makes it harder to get well-qualified replacements for the retirees.

HOLE DIGGER

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Joined: 06/26/10

Re: How many Licensed Surveyors is enough?

Posted by HOLE DIGGER on Aug 25, 2010 12:27 am

The problem is not that there are too many, it is that there are far too few actually in the field.

JFlamm PLS

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Joined: 06/28/10

Re: How many Licensed Surveyors is enough?

Posted by JFlamm PLS on Aug 25, 2010 8:56 am

Exactly what I was thinking, Hole Digger!

Billy Ferguson

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Joined: 06/07/10

Re: How many Licensed Surveyors is enough?

Posted by Billy Ferguson on Aug 25, 2010 11:17 am

HOLE DIGGER:
The problem is not that there are too many, it is that there are far too few actually in the field.

I see more licensed colleagues in the field now as apposed to just 2 years ago...not that they want to be, but the current economy dictates it.

Tom Bushelman

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Joined: 07/02/10

Re: How many Licensed Surveyors is enough?

Posted by Tom Bushelman on Aug 25, 2010 4:46 pm

The economic slowdown has removed the "C" grade and "B" grade employees and some of the A list which has resulted in better folks in the business now. Most importantly, as stated, it has put some of the licensed guys back out in the field a lot more. That has been lacking for a long time.

From all I read, there are more than enough surveyors to go around for a long while. I haven't been turning down much work lately even as a solo operator and I am most subject to getting an unmanageable backlog. The rate of licensing still seems to be reasonably steady in Kentucky even with the new education requirement. We'll see how it goes in the long term.

MountainHermit

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Joined: 04/14/10

Re: How many Licensed Surveyors is enough?

Posted by MountainHermit on Aug 26, 2010 1:33 pm

I disagree with the folks left being the better ones. The cheapos are still out there doing mortgage surveys for $99 and undercutting their colleagues on regular surveys. What I hope is that those crappy cheap surveys yield some work down the road for the rest of us who aren't currently busy and aren't grades B & C.

As for how many Licensed Surveyors is enough? We have enough now where I am located. Market dictates.

Rusty Chain

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Joined: 06/09/10

Re: How many Licensed Surveyors is enough?

Posted by Rusty Chain on Aug 26, 2010 2:46 pm

I never bought into the idea that there weren't enough. There was just an abundance of workload for a few years. Although there were lots of engineers and attorneys whining that they couldn't get the survey work done in the time frame they wanted, they weren't whining that they couldn't get it done at all.

Many of the engineers want to be able to hire cheaper unlicensed people to send out to do the work under their own (the engineer's) direction, and attorneys are always whining. Even when turn around on an ALTA on a 100 acre commercial site is a week, they whine. It is their lot in life to whine about others holding them up.

When we hear many clients saying things like "I've been trying to hire a surveyor for 6 months and no one will take the job because they're all too busy" we will know that there is a shortage. It is times like those we are now in, just a couple of years since most of us had several weeks or months of backlog, that shows that we don't have to few surveyors. I heard that there is something like a 30% unemployment rate in surveying. From what I see around here, that seems about accurate.

In the employee market, the B and C list employees are having a hard time as most employers are down to keeping their A list. But that does put a lot of those B and C folks out there working for themselves, under their own license or unlicensed, at rates that represent mediocre take home wages rather than reasonable professional billing rates.

We will always have that segment to contend with no matter what the economy is doing. They just take a bigger proportionate bite out of our business when most of our potential client base is looking to stretch their dollars as far as possible and don't realize that the fire sale surveyor will likely cause more problems than they solve and cost more in the long run.

In short, we will probably always have a perceived shortage of knowledgeable, well trained surveyors, and a glut of poorly trained, shoddy surveyors.