Workforce development is the investment in an organization’s most valuable assets—its people—so they have the knowledge and skills required to deliver significant business value.
Through workforce development, GIS teams can acquire the knowledge and skills they need to sustainably deliver high-value solutions, so they can support key business workflows and empower decision-making. But when skills and knowledge aren’t developed within GIS teams, organizations are unable to fully leverage their investment in ArcGIS. Under-developed staff are not aware of technology advancements or contemporary workflows, or they lack the skills required to take advantage of them. As a result, these organizations often rely on more expensive external resources, and staff unable to direct, manage, and monitor consultant work. Esri offers a multitude of resources to equip your staff with skills needed to achieve your organization’s strategic goals.
Assess whether you have access to staff or external resources that have the skills needed to implement, administer, or use the technical that supports (or that will support) business or mission-critical workflows. This topic also includes resources that help to understand common GIS roles on successful GIS teams and the kinds of skills that are generally required for those roles. Build a training plan for each GIS role in your organization to develop appropriate expertise.
Esri has multiple workforce development options to develop staff skill sets and knowledge around specific products, broader capabilities, and specific real-world business problems and workflows.
Building a successful GIS program is crucial for organizations to leverage the full potential of their investment. To design, sustain and grow this enterprise system, GIS-focused roles and responsibilities must be defined and stay current with the evolving GIS technology to ensure a secure optimally configured environment is maintained and available to end users.
Outlining what GIS focused roles and responsibilities are and how they can effectively coordinate and collaborate with their organization’s IT department roles and responsibilities is essential for supporting the technical environment GIS systems need to function. There are many ways GIS roles and responsibilities have been structured within a given organization. Some organizations have a centralized model within IT, some are hybrid with department roles reporting back to the main GIS division and others are decentralized management of GIS technology. The following outline is to share best practices for what GIS roles and responsibilities are and how they can work effectively both within and alongside their IT department.
A few of the most common roles in a GIS division or program are listed here, know that these are roles, not necessarily job titles. However structured, each role is important to successfully integrate GIS as an essential enterprise system and should be adequately equipped and resourced.
The GIS Manager is essential to providing the direction of the use of GIS and to ensuring the daily operations of the GIS team meet the needs of the organization. GIS Managers typically have years of experience as a GIS Analyst or related position, with a deep understanding of geospatial technology. GIS Managers often are called on to develop the long-term strategy of how GIS can deliver adoptable, substantiable solutions across the organization. This role may not be directly involved with technical responsibilities for larger organizations. Instead, they will focus on the financial and project management duties. In smaller organizations, the GIS Manager may be much more involved with defining the procedure and standards of GIS-based solutions. In either case, it is the GIS Manager that the organization depends on to develop the successful GIS team.
Related Job Titles: Geospatial Technical Director, GIS Coordinator
This role specializes in visualizing data as meaningful information, enabling others to do their work better and gain insight through intuitive representations of organizational and external data.
Related Job Titles: GIS Analyst, GIS Technician, GIS Specialist
This role administrates ArcGIS Enterprise components and related IT resources to ensure the efficient, performant, and secure delivery of the organization’s geospatial solutions. The responsibilities of this role may vary greatly based on the size of the organization and the depth of IT resources supporting the enterprise GIS. Smaller organizations might depend on this role to configure and troubleshoot IT issues related to the performance of ArcGIS Enterprise. In larger organizations, this role could coordinate with IT staff to maintain and resolve enterprise GIS issues.
Related Job Titles: GIS Analyst, GIS Technician, GIS Specialist*
The title of GIS Analyst typically encompasses several geospatial roles, ranging from cartographer to application development to enterprise GIS administrator. However, the core role of the analyst is to understand and analyze data using GIS technology and discover patterns and trends through spatial data. This role is expected to have a strong command of modern geospatial tools required to process and gain insight from this data.
Related Job Titles: GIS Specialist, GIS Technician, Cartographer
This role is responsible for creating, maintaining, and correcting the organization’s spatial data using GIS tools.
Related Job Titles: GIS Specialist, GIS Technician, GIS Data Editor
This role would develop and maintain intuitive, fit-for-purpose geospatial based applications to enable end users to accomplish their work better through applying location intelligence. The level of experience and skills can vary greatly based on the organization’s needs. Applications can be created through no-code tools to configure ArcGIS surveys, author dashboards, create web and mobile applications as well as through highly customized applications using higher level programming languages such as JavaScript, C++, etc. to automating routine tasks or workflows.
Related Job Titles: Geospatial Solutions Developer, Computer Programmer, Software Engineer, Software Developer, GIS Developer