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Careers

Geospatial Technologies support a wide range of business, environmental and government decisions. However, there is a worldwide lack of qualified professionals capable of creating and using these technologies. Putting points on a map is not enough; society needs professionals who create new applications, methodologies and solutions.

Geospatial Technologies is an interdisciplinary area that bridges informatics and geosciences. Graduates of the international Master degree program apply and develop computer-supported solutions to spatially related problems (global, regional, local). The degree program provides specialized knowledge in:

  • Fundamentals of Geographic Information
  • Web and Server technologies
  • Geographic Information Science
  • Informatics and applied Mathematics.

 

The following core competences are provided by regular or additional courses:

  • English language
  • Research methods
  • Creative and critical thinking for problem-solving decision-making and responsibility
  • Fortification of competences and cognitive skills
  • Students’ own initiative
  • Capacity for team work
  • Presentation of results (oral, written)
  • Practical experience
  • Multi-cultural competencies.

 

Career

The geospatial information and technology fields are inherently based on international cooperation in business and research. Therefore, this international Master program was created to qualify students for an international professional career in private, governmental or academic sectors. All students study in at least two European countries, English is the language of instruction, and students gain multicultural experience interacting with other students from European and non-European countries.

The career opportunities in the Geospatial Technologies sector can be considered as globally excellent. There are a few studies with projections on market and employment growth, all of them very positive. According to a report by Federal Geographic Data Committee (https://bit.ly/2OT3Qv8), the geospatial technology and services industry is growing in the world economies, driving significant benefits and providing high-wage jobs. A 2012 study by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) estimated that the U.S. geospatial industry provides at least 500,000 high-wage jobs. The Geospatial Information and Technology Association (GITA) recently reported that the geospatial information technology (IT) sector has recently been growing by 35% per year, with the commercial side growing at a rate of 100% annually. In addition, the U.S. Department of Labor recently identified the geospatial technology sector as one of the three technology areas that would create the greatest number of new jobs over the next decade. For 2012-2022, 40.600 job openings for Geospatial Scientists and Technologists are projected just for the USA (O Net online, 2010: Summary report Geospatial Scientists and Technologists, https://bit.ly/2wcepCY). Worldwide, a 2012 study by Oxera commissioned by Google estimated that the global geospatial services sector generates $150 to $270 billion annually. By comparison, this is greater than the $25 billion generated by the video games industry, roughly equivalent to the $140 billion in revenue from the global security services industry, and about one-third of the global airline industry’s annual revenues of $594 billion.

More recently, 2017, a Geospatial media and communications study (https://bit.ly/2SBS21w) reports that the size of the Geospatial industry worldwide amounts to $500 billion. The global GIS market, in itself, was valued at $9,835.5 million in 2017 and is forecasted to witness a CAGR of 10.2% during 2018–2023 (June 2018 source https://bit.ly/2vArzJW).

These are just a few examples that show the global financial dimension of this sector. As a result of this rapid growth there is a severe lack of qualified GI professionals in industry, government, and academia. This lack severely limits the further growth of the field as well. Geographic Information (GI) is thus urgently required for solving societal and economic problems; at the same time, there is a lack of qualified personnel for doing so. A major challenge in making GI more usable for enterprises, administrations, science, and in this proposal especially citizens, is to integrate it into common decision-making workflows and technologies across regions, countries, communities, and languages. Thus, the objective of the EMJMD is to address the following needs:

  • Economic. The economic needs are threefold: a need for know-how, a need for qualified personnel, and a need for innovative technologies. The difficulty to integrate GI into workflows and technologies is a key impediment for its use in policy making, planning and decision processes, as well as for the growth of the GI industry. The EMJMD directly addresses the European need for highly qualified personnel in a rapidly growing economic and public sector tasked with obligations like the INSPIRE (Infrastructure for spatial information in Europe) mandate. All participating faculties are involved in industry and government projects solving strategic and operational problems of creating value from GI. They regularly pass on their experience in their teaching and thesis advising.
  • Societal. GI is an essential tool to address societal challenges. A practical example from WWU’s cooperation with the Brazilian Institute for Space Research (INPE) is monitoring (and saving) the Amazonian tropical forests, which not only implies observing by remote sensing and modelling by simulation, but also adequate environmental and urban planning, managing socially motivated migration, considering economic incentives, improving city service management, etc. – all areas where research and personnel in GI is needed. At all three sites, EMJMD students get confronted with and have to contribute to real world case studies and projects in areas of high social relevance (most recently in the fields of mobility, the urban environment, and public health ).
  • Educational: Due to the current lack of qualified personnel, Masters graduates have excellent career opportunities in the public and private sector as well as in academia. Solving the mentioned scientific and economic challenges requires highly educated personnel with conceptual and ICT skills. Therefore, the EMJMD’s education and training programme targets “highly specialised knowledge, some of which is at the forefront of knowledge in a field of work or study, as the basis for original thinking and/or research” (level 7 of the European Qualifications Framework (EQF), https://bit.ly/2HzO58x). It implements this target through a balanced combination of basic level, advanced skill development, and problem-based teaching.
  • Scientific: Research on applications of Geospatial Technologies is innovative and transcends disciplinary boundaries in an increasingly data-rich society. Research on and development of novel approaches to integrate and harmonize geospatial data and services are required to take advantage of the growing quantity and quality of data referring to location and time, including data provided by citizens. Methods need to be developed to solve integration problems resulting from incompatible technologies, heterogeneous semantics and data quality levels and sources, underspecified data models, obstructing data access policies, lacking data usability, economic and legal barriers, but also privacy and intellectual property issues. The ambitious thesis projects at the three sites guide students to problem-solving that is responsible, intellectually well founded and trans-disciplinary.
  • Strategic: The EMJMD will help to achieve the critical mass to compete with leading North American and Asia Pacific institutions. In the past, Master students from all over the world were mainly attracted by GI programmes in the US, which increased the competitive advantage of the US. International cooperation in research and industry is still largely US-driven, e.g., through the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), — the world-wide standards body in GI technologies—or the Earth imaging satellite industry. An EMJMD responds to this challenge by taking advantage of the recent shift of attention to Europe on matters of data protection, 5G communications, and its own satellite, aerospace, and ground surveying industries.
  • On a global scale, many of the most pressing “wicked problems” or global challenges are intrinsically linked to geospatial aspects. The Sustainable Development Goals identified by UN (https://bit.ly/37teLSy), for example, include issues such as “sustainable cities and communities”, “climate change” and “protect the environment”. In the same way European societal challenges 2020 and Horizon Europe 2021-27 also address problems such as health, demographic change, well-being, food security, sustainable agriculture and forestry, marine and maritime inland water research, climate action, environment, resource efficiency, inclusive, innovative and reflective societies and open science and competitiveness, all of which have a spatial component and are addressed by GI analytical methods.
  • A thorough understanding of GI and the associated technologies is essential to analyse, model and present these problems. The same is true for the development and assessment of potential solutions to address these challenges. The EMJMD also aims at educating students to enable them to participate in tackling these problems head on.
  • A joint degree programme spanning three globally important languages in its host countries (German, Spanish, and Portuguese) and taught in the lingua franca of technology (English) provides an immense advantage to the students entering a globalized job market. Furthermore, a recent (2014) large-scale European survey in 20+ EU (https://bit.ly/2OPDCJW), performed in the context of the European Lifelong Learning project GI-N2K, of which all consortium members were project partners, indeed shows that: 1/ there is a gap between GI Science and Technology market demand and educational supply, 2/ there is a need and desire among professionals to acquire core GI, data analysis and informatics skills, 3/ there is few offer of teaching programs addressing these combined skills. Similar results were obtained by the Erasmus+ Sector Skill Alliance project EO4GEO (2018 – http://www.eo4geo.eu), of which UJI is a project partner.
  • Also our experiences with the ongoing EMJMD show the need for personnel educated in the field of Geospatial Technologies. In August/September 2017, we provided online questionnaires to all alumni. Among other questions we addressed professional careers (Figure 1). Sixty-three (out of 192) alumni responded. Twenty-two percent of 63 responding alumni found a job within 1 month after graduation, 19 % within 2-3 months, 17.5 % within 3-6 months, 6.3 % within 6-12 months, and 4.8 % after 12 months (see inline figure). Three percent of the graduates have started another Master programme, 19 % with a PhD, demonstrating the learning capacity they have built and their eagerness to further develop themselves. Only 5 of 63 respondents (7.9 %) did not find a job or did not continue studying. We did not ask for details in the questionnaire, but we know by personal communication that some of the graduates were not looking for a job immediately after graduation due to personal reasons, e.g., pregnancy, child care, planning a sabbatical, sickness.

 

figure

Figure 1. Time to first job after graduation. 

  • On a scale from 5 = „my job is within my professional field“ to 1 = „in an unrelated field“, 50 % of the graduates with a job (not PhD/Master students) answered with a „5“, 27.1 % with a „4“.
  • The distribution across sectors is 30.2%/28.6%/17.5%/6.3% for Academia/Industry/Government/NGOs. This result matches with the original concept of the Master programme to train for professional careers in Academia, Industry, and Government.
  • The survey reveals that our graduates have excellent career chances. This is supported by the personal impressions of the alumni. On a scale from 5 = „the Masters program was beneficial for my professional career“ to 1 = „not beneficial“, 60.3 % thought the program beneficial (scale 5), and 22.2 % mostly agreed (scale 4).
  • Obviously, the Master programme itself and its accompanying career develop measures (e.g., career development sessions, company visits, secondary skill acquisition, networking opportunities) provide a very good springboard for successful professional careers. One might consider that we are supported by the „luxury position“ offering a study programme in the broad field of Informatics, where graduates have per se very good career opportunities.

 

Surveys

Study programme success: 193 of 204 students starting with the program graduated within three semesters. Two more students finished the programme one semester later due to sickness. Four students really failed, 5 students dropped out due to personal reasons (family problems, pregnancy, psychological problems); one student had to be expelled due to falsified application documents. Almost all students were able to graduate within time. In German study programmes, up to 30 % of first-semester students drop out within the first year. The numbers in our programme show that content and organization of the study programme are well-communicated in advance and are as expected, and that modules, courses, and workload are appropriate.

In 2017, we conducted a survey amongst alumni and staff of the past 10 years, and the current students.

  • 92 % of our alumni found a job or went on with a PhD or another Master programme (cf. 1.3.1) within a year. From now on, we will repeat the alumni survey every year one year after graduation in order to track the professional careers of our graduates.
  • 100 % of the staff think that the Mundus Master substantially improves the internationalisation of their institutes, 87 % of the staff think the Master programme beneficial for their own professional experience (cf. 4.2.1)
  • > 60 % of the graduates from developing and emerging countries returned to their home countries. For further insights to “brain drain vs. brain gain”, cf. results in the proposal “additional award criteria”.

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