Author's note: I've transferred this article that I wrote for LinkedIn to my personal blog because I feel that the vision behind it goes beyond just work applications. Share knowledge, use your experiences to empower and uplift others, and help build a future where everything is brighter because you chose to share your light.
I've always said that my greatest ambition is to work myself out of a job. "Well, that's counterproductive" you might say, after all, aren't we here to try to make money? The answer is yes, but I have a vision for how I'd like to do that, and it's not by hoarding knowledge and making people reliant on my skill set for everything to do with maps and data and geoprocessing. Here's the gist of it people, GIS has gone mainstream and it's only a matter of time before anyone can pull data from various sources and combine it into a map that gives them the answers to their tough questions.
So where does that leave geospatial professionals? Not in the dust I tell you. We are the facilitators, the supporters, the encouragers; the inspiration and energy behind every client brave enough to dip their toes into the fascinating waters of our world. Why not pull them into the wonders of what we know? Like the guiding hand on the seat of the bike as our child strikes off down the road on two wheels for the first time, at some point we need to let go, but not before we have initiated them, taught them the value of good, clean data, or how important it is to have a sound infrastructure. Those training wheels are where we do our best work, guiding, shaping the vision they have with best practices and the wealth of decades of lessons learned in the realm of data management so that the end products come alive with clear, accurate, clean, precise information.
The trick, my friends, is to build the relationships, not just the data repository. I challenge you to empower your clients with sound workflows and the highest caliber of your knowledge, then enthusiastically turn them loose and let them build out their own geospatial infrastructure, cheering them on from the curbside. Sure, you may end up working yourself out of a job at the entry-level of the spectrum, but what you create is a whole new tribe of GIS enthusiasts who are inspired through your leadership to push for more, build bigger and better things, and start to really yearn for the true power of GIS, the advanced analytics that may be beyond their scope but are well within yours. And who do you think they'll call when they get there?
Map Happy!
~Tamarin
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