Last year I undertook a survey for 5 months examining all advertised GIS jobs in New Zealand. This article analyses the results of that study, and comes up with some interesting and surprising data...

Some highlights:

53% of job adverts mentioning GIS keywords have GIS as only a secondary part of the overall job requirements whereas 47% of jobs are focussed on GIS as a primary part of the role. This is interesting given the concepts I mentioned in my previous blog post about 'the great tribes of the GIS industry'.

This is interesting given the concepts I mentioned in my previous blog post about 'the great tribes of the GIS industry'. Local Government agencies offered more than three times the number of GIS jobs than Central Government (Federal Government) (this was a surprise to me)

(this was a surprise to me) 15% of GIS Jobs are related to transportation, logistics or deliveries. I was surprised how high this percentage was.

I was surprised how high this percentage was. Christchurch and Wellington have the largest per-capita GIS employment markets, while Auckland has the largest in real terms.

One GIS job per day is advertised in New Zealand (which may not seem like many but remember NZ has a population of only 4.5 million people)

(which may not seem like many but remember NZ has a population of only 4.5 million people) One important caveat is that this survey does not include any 'head hunting'/back door job offers, which in my opinion are common in the industry. It would be impossible to try to collect data for those types of situations which take place in private.

More details follow below.

The survey collected a number of attributes for each job derived from the advertisement. The attributes included: Job Title, Organisation Advertising, Primary Industry of the job, whether the job focusses on GIS or whether GIS plays only a secondary part of the job, what technology (software) skills are stated as a requirement, location within NZ and salary (where stated). Some of the results of that study are below.

Some of the reasons that I undertook this study are that I have been encouraging, engaging with. mentoring and working with GIS students and recent graduates. They have told me that when they leave their educational institution often they have very little knowledge of the industry that they are about to enter into, the opportunities on offer and perhaps some of the courses/studies that they can do to enhance their chances of getting jobs.

The approach that I took was to register keyword job searches (using "GIS, Geography, Location, Spatial, Geographic") on 3 of the most popular job search websites in NZ and then I filtered out 'false positive' jobs, removed duplicates and recorded a few attributes from each job description. One of the reasons that I took this approach is that I wanted to have an empirical method of determining the structure of the GIS Industry in NZ. While science may be under attack in some parts of the world ("this country has had enough of experts!") I think that GIS professionals still think that making judgments based on EVIDENCE is still a good idea. I also made the source data and analysis 'open' so that anyone could verify and if critique my findings or methods if they wanted to (that's part of science y'all).

Be wary of 'opinions' and 'alternative facts'

I know that there are a lot of 'experts' out there (many of whom are self-appointed) that like to give opinions on things like where the industry is heading and what skills will be needed (at the end of the year there are always the 'expert predictions for what will be big this year', which I have concerns about: consciously or unconsciously it seems to me that often those 'experts' seem to think that whatever it is that their company happens to be selling is going to be 'the next big thing', or that technology that they provide consultancy or services with is going to 'finally come of age and take on the big boys'. If they are a customer, that whatever technology they have just decided to purchase is going to be great (hence their judgement was awesome! Aren't they clever?). Sometimes government officials have other agendas that influence their commentary. Aren't these interesting coincidences then? But where is the EVIDENCE that they are basing their judgments on? Are perhaps some of them offering some 'alternative facts' that suit their own objectives?(Most of the world has a different word for 'alternative facts' BTW).

Note: for the sake of disclosure I should point out that I am employed by a software distributor, so of course if I express any OPINIONS then I too may unconsciously be influenced by bias, however that is something that I have tried to avoid with this exercise, again by using evidence.

Be wary of 'opinion polls'

I also have concerns with 'voluntary' salary surveys etc. While these at least attempt to gather data to base analysis on I am concerned about whether the samples that are used are truly representative of the industry. The 2015 SIBA Salary Survey Summary made this comment about it's analysis for New Zealand: "the overall sample is not large and anomalies may arise from the lack of truly random sampling". I think that bias can be introduced by if the invitation and uptake of these kind of surveys does result in a truly representative sample. I note that the 2015 SIBA survey mentioned "An increase in the numbers from Federal/Central Government agencies this year is due to a significant response from LINZ in New Zealand" which indicates that perhaps the invitation and encouragement to participate was strong in that one specific organisation and therefore may skew the results.

Another concern I have with surveys is that the sponsoring organisations often don't release their 'source data' for other people to scrutinise. One of the headline findings promoted from their survey by URISA was "GISPs, on average, earned $10,000 more than non-GISPs" which sounds great for URISA (which just happens to be the organisation that invented the GISP certification and 'sells' it?) However whether there is truly a 'cause and effect' that URISA seems to be implying with this statement is difficult to delve into further because as far as I am aware URISA doesn't release their source data openly. With the assertion that URISA are making with that statement my first thought was: well if recent GIS graduates don't earn as much as industry seniors, and if you need to have been working in the industry for a few years to even be eligible to obtain a GIS-P then if a number of GIS graduates took part in the survey then that would probably explain some of that difference? A better analysis would be to take a subset like people of equal age and the compare salaries for GIS-P and non GIS-P respondents (science hat on yet again).

There are other aspects of data such as the URISA data that I would love to think of my own queries for: maybe like comparing salaries of segmented age groups between genders for example: there is an overall salary difference across the whole market, but for example in under 30's is it becoming more even?

Unfortunately with out access to the source data I can't test my own theories.

That being said, I do think that the GIS-P and surveys such as SIBA and URISA have some value and should be reviewed by recent graduates for some ideas about the industry, but they should have an open mind regarding some of these types of concerns. They do collect different data to what is available through my approach below, and certain things like salaries are better captured through their surveys. I thought a complimentary approach is to do something that avoids some of those surveys pitfalls. Using publicly available job advertisements is a non-obtrusive, non-voluntary way to get a picture of some elements of the GIS job industry that is less likely to be consciously or unconsciously biased, or to be skewed by an unrepresentative sample.

Primary Industry of Job

Note: this one was tricky for reasons such as:

organisations that are advertising jobs but that service more than one industry (e.g. some civil engineering firms may service utilities, communications and construction industries). In these cases I have had to make a judgement call.

organisations that could fit under several categories, such as the Ministry for Transport for example: would that be a Central Govt agency or part of the Transport industry? In these cases I have assumed the former, but I can see arguments the other way.

Judging by the results below: if you are a student in NZ then maybe augmenting your GIS studies with studying local govt responsibilities like town planing and resource management might be a good move? Or taking a transport and logistics course or two?

Job Titles (Raw results)

The table below show the 'raw' job titles from the 140 job advertisements. Some things that this demonstrates is the breadth of the types of roles where GIS is used.

THIS IS A LONG LIST YOU MIGHT WANT TO SCROLL DOWN AFTER YOU GET THE IDEA.





The table above also demonstrates how there are many different names that GIS (geospatial/location/geomatic/spatial) jobs go by that might or might not be synonymous. Also having prefixes and suffixes such as 'Senior' or 'Trainee' makes it difficult to see true patterns so I have consolidated many of the above jobs taking those things into account to get a better assessment of the types of jobs:





Regional Distribution

Some interesting results here: clearly the large cities have more GIS jobs per capita than the smaller regions. Interestingly despite Auckland having the largest GIS workforce with 37% of the jobs, Canterbury and Wellington have a larger percentage per capita, possibly due to the earthquake rebuild employment and because most of the Central Govt departments are headquartered in Wellington.

Software/Technology mentioned in advertisement





Notes:

In looking at software I have avoided specifying many 'families' of software such as 'ERP' or 'CAD' unless there was an actual software product such as SAP or AutoCAD. I did however think that it was worthwhile collecting the advertisements that mentioned things like 'SQL' or 'HTML' were worth including in this analysis. Obviously some jobs mentioned more than one software type. For example one advertisement for MetOcean solutions stated:"We use the latest and greatest web technologies and this is a perfect opportunity to get exposed and gain experience. We expect a fundamental understanding of how the web works including javascript, html5, css3 and experience in a server side language. An understanding of some of these concepts is needed: cors, cdn, xss, accept headers, ddd, cqrs, tdd, REST, event sourcing, pub sub, microservices, soa, mvc, mvvm, IoC, SOLID, DRY and YAGNI. We're using coffeescript, svg, d3, crossfilter, velocityjs, leaflet, momentjs, bootstrap, less, nodejs, gulp, redis, rabbitmq, expressjs, handlebars, oauth2, passportjs and docker... Some knowledge of web mapping frameworks and GIS technologies" An important note that I would mention for students and recent grads about this and some of the results below that were only mentioned a few times is: IF YOU DON'T HAVE THESE SKILLS DON'T WORRY, if you have never heard of most of these don't worry you are in good company. I have only heard of a few of them as well! A high proportion (31%) of adverts did not specify any specific software (they just said things like "must be proficient with GIS". Whether this is because those employers assume that if you know one GIS you know them all, or whether those employers don't know what skills they specifically want etc is an interesting question. The following chart is a count of where specific software or techology was mentioned from a the sample of 140 advertisements.





Organisations advertising

With counts of the number of advertisements.

Salary

Unfortunately this was seldom mentioned in the job advertisements. The actual records where it was mentioned were:

I'm hoping to repeat this type of survey, for which I have developed some good processes and protocols, although it is a lot of work!

The raw data for this study can be found here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxBZceNaDaDSZ2pZdEdHQ3dZZUk

The actual job advertisements can be found here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxBZceNaDaDSdDBLenpBZzl5eDQ

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Any OPINIONS expressed are not necessarily those of my employer, the ESP Group nor any other party.