How a Data Analyst Became a GIS Expert (And What You Can Learn)

In this episode, we sit down with David Price, GIS Project Manager for Wood County, Ohio, to explore the evolving landscape of modern GIS. David’s journey into geospatial wasn’t a traditional one—he started in data analytics before discovering GIS, a shift that completely changed his career trajectory.

We dive into:

🔹 Why GIS education is falling behind and how universities are missing the mark
🔹 The critical skills GIS professionals need today (Hint: It’s more than just mapping)
🔹 The debate: Do you really need to learn to code to stay competitive?
🔹 Open-source vs. Esri: Why a hybrid approach is the future of GIS
🔹 The power of real-time data, automation, and APIs in GIS workflows

David shares his experiences managing an enterprise GIS system, adapting to new geospatial technologies, and why he believes learning SQL and Python can future-proof your GIS career.

If you’re a GIS professional, student, or just someone interested in the future of geospatial technology, this is an episode you don’t want to miss!

What is Spatial Stack with Matt Forrest?

Welcome to The Spatial Stack, where modern geospatial technology takes center stage. Our episodes feature interviews with leading experts, insightful discussions on the integration of AI and big data in spatial tech, and case studies on groundbreaking projects worldwide. Tune in to stay ahead in the rapidly evolving world of geospatial technology!

And that's the biggest thing is you don't really

need the four years of computer science background.

If you just start getting in there and start

working with this stuff,

you'll surprise yourself how easy it is

to start to manipulate data with a few strings of code.

What if I told you that your entire perspective

on GIS and geospatial careers is about to shift?

Today's guest didn't start in geography.

He came from data analytics.

But when he discovered GIS,

it changed everything from obsessing over maps

of Middle Earth as a kid to running enterprise

GIS systems.

His journey is proof that modern GIS is evolving.

In this episode,

I have a chat with David Price,

GIS manager in Bowling Green,

Ohio,

and ERISA Vanguard cabinet member.

And we're diving deep into the future of GIS education,

why traditional degrees might not be enough,

and how you can stay ahead by learning coding,

spatial data science and open source tools.

Plus,

we're going to talk about a big question that's

on everyone's mind.

Will GIS professionals who don't learn to code

get left behind?

If you've ever wondered what it really takes

to succeed in GIS today,

this episode is for you.

right,

welcome.

Thanks for for grabbing some time to join me here today.

David,

you are the GIS project manager at in Wood

County in Ohio.

And yeah,

I just wanted to let you introduce yourself

and then we'll we'll jump into it.

Yeah,

awesome.

Thanks,

Matt.

And thanks for inviting me on having the time

to make this work.

I'm really excited.

As you said,

I'm the GIS project manager for Wood County

in Northwest Ohio.

I've been in the position

a few years now and I'm getting excited to

talk about GIS education.

I don't

have strong,

I'm not super connected in education.

I sit on the advisory board for the University

of Toledo for Geography and Planning.

I'm kind of the young head that they brought in to get

some new ideas going,

get somebody who is in the area who works in

the geospatial world to get some ideas flowing.

And so sort of off the back of that,

when I saw that you were interested in bringing

guys on to talk about different things,

I immediately thought,

how about how we talk about GIS and the education

surrounding it in the geospatial world?

So,

yeah.

Yeah,

I think I think it'll be good to get into some

of the like educational tracks and,

you know,

how you've seen that.

Of course,

you're coming to it from an outside perspective,

as it were.

But I think,

you know,

kind of going to there and getting through

all that will be interesting.

But I think,

you know,

as as like many of us that end up in this space,

of course,

you've had an interest in geospatial or maps

or things like that,

you know,

from from a young age.

I mean,

I remember the same for me.

I had this atlas.

I think I won it in third grade.

And the thing is probably falling

apart somewhere at this point.

But,

you know,

it was one of those things always kind of drew you in.

So you it's when we talked the first time you

were the same way.

Yeah,

absolutely.

And the one thing that I always point out is

I got to give Tolkien his dues.

Huge Lord of the Rings fan and the Middle Earth map,

you know,

just being able to I got a copy of the Silmarillion

when I was young,

because that's how into it.

I'd like to read the textbooks to not just

the actual lore.

And it had a full out map.

And I just remember obsessing over

Middle Earth.

Really,

really enjoying the world building aspect of mapping.

And,

you know,

it was something that I was always interested in.

I did it myself and I did world building and

I drew my own maps.

And then,

you know,

I shelved it for 10 years and I got into high

school and it became a little too nerdy or

whatever I thought it was,

you know.

And eventually

I,

you know,

bounced around.

I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do with

myself in university.

And I landed in a data analytics track where

I was introduced into GIS.

And then I was like,

it just blew the doors off.

I'm like,

maps are back.

I want to I want to build maps.

I want to I want to use geospatial data to

drive analysis.

So,

yeah,

I mean,

that's the that's how I got got into GIS.

I do.

I come from a data analytics background.

So it's a little bit

different than than the normal geography track,

you know.

Yeah.

So your

let's talk a little

bit about your kind of like

educational path.

I think it'll set up for the conversation later.

You obviously have a you have a degree in or

a focus area in data analytics.

And kind of how did you get to that and then

how did you eventually morph that into a career in GIS?

Yeah,

so I was so I came off the back of an associate's

degree at our local community college because

I didn't know what I wanted to do and I wanted

cheap education,

get my foot in the door,

start work and start doing stuff.

So I got a psychology degree and then looking

at the next steps,

I'm looking at the University of Toledo,

which is the area that I'm from.

And all of a sudden I noticed,

oh,

they have a data analytics

program.

And it was new at the time,

relatively uncharted territories for the University

of Toledo.

And I got to sit down and speak with the chair

who created the program and pick his brain.

And I was super,

super interested.

And I've

always been a data guy,

data first.

I want to use data,

analyze data and use it to drive decisions.

That's

what I like to do.

You know,

a lot of people look at me and it's like,

this dude's a weirdo.

But,

you know,

I think a lot of people

will out there kind of agree and understand

what I'm getting at.

Yeah,

I mean,

it's certainly something

where everyone that I know in this space is very,

you hear a statement and you start to go back to like,

give me the facts,

you know,

and you want to prove that out with data or

something like that.

So,

you know,

going in from the data analytics side,

what were some of the things that you started

to learn or the skills that you were,

you practiced in that program and did those

transfer over to geospatial?

Or was it like a whole new learning curve once

you started to move into the GIS space?

There's definitely a lot of overlap,

especially coming

from learning more fundamental programming

and having a strong background in SQL,

understanding SQL was huge because I feel like

in the normal GIS track,

you get a little bit of it

with query builder and the things inside of some of the,

you know,

inside of the Esri products that just come stock.

And I think that's where I honestly have the

edge coming from more of a data background

and coming from more of a computer science background

allows me to interact with the data on a much

more granular level than it would be just somebody

who's learned to push buttons in an interface.

Having come from a technical background,

you know,

learning programming,

SQL,

Python,

things like that.

How was it picking up the geospatial side,

the GIS side

and where were there roadblocks,

if any?

Yeah,

I think honestly the major roadblocks for me

was trying to come in and understand the UI.

Like I'm just going to run geoprocessing tools,

I'm going to search the little tool in the toolbox,

and I'm going to run it.

What actually blew the doors off for me was

understanding that

when you go and you use those geoprocessing tools,

next to the run button in ArcMap or ArcPro,

there's a little three dots and you can select

that and you can actually grab the code

out and you can understand what is this tool

actually doing.

And I think getting beyond sort of the black box,

like here's a tool and if you input some data,

it will do something to it.

Actually getting into that nitty gritty,

because I come

from reading code and developing,

it provided that insight that I was sort of missing,

but I don't think

the relationship is exactly the same,

you know,

on the other end.

It's not mirrored,

like you were saying,

you hit the nail on the head.

It's much more difficult for somebody who understands

mapping and cartography and geography and has

a good understanding of how Esri products

work,

for them to then go in and understand programming

and getting into Python or JavaScript or something

like that,

I feel like is much,

much,

much more difficult.

And actually,

I have people that reach out to me all the time,

international students and different people

on LinkedIn looking for jobs,

trying to understand how can I make myself

more competitive.

And a lot of the things that I hear is that people

worry that they're going to get pushed out

by people who have more of a competitive computer

science background.

They just don't think,

you know,

how can I hack it against somebody who can

write a Python script when all I can do is,

know,

use the interface that I know of and that I'm aware of.

And so I think that there's a lot of room for

growth in terms of

adding in just general beginner coding lessons

in a work plan for just a standard GIS bachelor's

undergrad program.

I think that we need to really try to focus

a little bit more on just showing people,

like giving people a taste.

A little introduction is really all you need

nowadays with the capabilities that we have with AI.

I think,

honestly,

you need to understand

generally how scripts are set

up.

But I think it's never been easier to learn

programming than it is in the modern era right now,

especially even coming from a GIS background.

It's never been easier.

It's still very,

very,

very scary for somebody who has never touched it before,

And I think a lot of people are still telling

themselves they can't do it.

And that's the biggest thing,

is you don't really need the four years of

computer science background.

If you just start getting in there and start

working with this stuff,

you'll surprise yourself how easy it

is to start to manipulate data with a few strings

of code.

You know,

you don't have to write a 100,

200 page

script or application.

It really can be quite simple with some rudimentary

ArcPy functions.

And then all of a sudden you're manipulating

data and you're like,

oh,

God,

I can do a lot with this.

You know?

Yeah,

I think

the biggest takeaway I would say to that is

that you have a lot of people that can write good code.

That's a very good skill to have and apply

it across anything,

data engineering,

data science,

you know,

software engineering,

whatever that might be.

What you do have as a GIS practitioner,

even if you're just using ArcGIS Pro,

QGIS,

anything like that,

is no matter what you do,

you do understand spatial thinking.

And understanding

spatial thinking as it relates to data and

how you manipulate and work with data,

that in and of itself is an important skill.

And I try not to tell people,

like,

don't underplay that.

You're still doing something incredibly valuable,

even if that is.

Now,

how you transfer that thinking and express

that through Python or SQL,

that's like the next level up.

That I think you probably got to put those

two together pretty quickly,

right?

And you could say,

yes,

oh,

I understand that,

you know,

doing a spatial join looks like this,

and here's how I would express that.

Or maybe something as complex as,

like,

nearest neighbors or those types of things.

Once you understand how data and code work,

you can start to express those things,

you know,

through the spatial libraries that exist.

And I think,

you know,

that certainly is one key part of that.

But as you've started to grow your career,

and I think one thing you said that was like,

how practitioner or practicing,

I guess,

is the way to put it,

like,

doing that

analytics and those types of

processes is one piece.

But then jumping into a larger organization

or an enterprise or something like that becomes

a whole other ballgame.

Like,

what

were your experiences with doing those types of things?

- Yeah,

so I guess to backtrack slightly,

like I said,

I come from a data analytics background,

so I probably didn't have the same number of

GIS and geography courses that somebody would,

you know,

who is getting,

who's majoring in GIS.

But what

I really noticed about GIS courses is that

there's a lack of

large-scale enterprise experience because these

universities aren't going to be able to afford

to do an enterprise deployment just to sort

of teach people how to interact

with it.

So I guess

what I would say is if you think you understand

GIS because you took some college courses,

you really need to wait until you understand

what an enterprise deployment is because it's a beast.

Thankfully,

I was able to come into a situation where I

had a database administrator,

and I also had a GIS analyst underneath me

who were able to help me sort of get my feet

and understand,

okay,

wow,

an enterprise system offers a lot of things

that I've never even heard of,

that weren't even touched on in my program at all.

And just to throw a few of those things out there,

I mean,

obviously,

coding behind the basics,

but even just like something as simple as working

with an API,

how to extract data out of an API,

how to push data through,

how to handle GeoJSON,

you know,

anything like that,

even real-time data applications

was something that I never had any experience with.

And when I was able to teach myself how to

do those things,

again,

it blew the doors off not only my own

understanding of GIS,

but my superiors,

my coworkers,

people that I worked with were like,

"You're grabbing real-time weather data anytime

I drop a point out there?

Like,

you could do that?" You know,

and I was kind of in the same boat.

I was like,

"Yeah,

I guess I can do that.

I didn't even really know,

but we figured it out,

right?" You know,

just like those little things

where I feel like if we could

sort of bite down a little bit harder on those

early GIS courses,

I wouldn't have been sitting there thinking

that I made some huge win out of something

that's really not that difficult to do,

you know?

- Right.

Yeah,

there is this gap between...and it's something

I know we'll get into a little bit later,

but like,

how do you learn those programming fundamentals

and do you need a degree to do that or certification

or whatever that might be?

I think there's...I mean,

I have my thoughts and we'll talk about that in a bit,

but you said something

there that I wanted to point out,

which was,

you know,

kind of getting connected

and,

you

know,

doing more than maybe was just demanded,

right?

You know,

you're kind of,

you know,

how do you get plugged in?

How do you do more than just simply relying

on the degree that you have?

And use the people

and experiences around you to grow your knowledge

and your career?

Like,

what...and what else,

what extra did you do to decide besides just

that in the day-to-day to kind of expand your skill set,

knowledge,

so forth?

- I think we are really,

really blessed in our industry that there are

so many fanatics out there.

If you want to get plugged in and you want

to do more and you want to learn,

there are spaces and opportunities out there.

So for me,

the biggest one for me right off the rip would

be formerly known as ERISA,

GPN now is what they're calling it,

the Geospatial Professional Network.

That had a huge impact in me right out of school

because I feel like I didn't get sort of a

full GIS education.

Being able to go to some of their conferences

and hook up with some of those people in that

organization and speak to them about what they learned,

it's

irreplaceable.

I mean,

you really can't replace the institutional

knowledge that somebody else has of our industry.

And so I would say,

you know,

immediately once you graduate,

you got to start jumping in,

look for a state,

local state organization,

look for your ERISA chapter in your region,

and then obviously big ERISA,

formerly ERISA,

Geospatial Professional Network.

It's going to be difficult for me to lock that one in,

but it's a fantastic group.

They,

you know,

hold different things all over the place.

Their major conference is GIS Pro.

I have

spoke at and heard many,

many,

many fantastic presentations given there.

If you have any

interest in continuing education,

I think the first thing,

the first places that you should look at are

these sort of larger national level and even global

level organizations.

- Yeah,

I agree.

I mean,

I benefited a lot from learning in my early

career from people around me.

And I think that that's one place you can go.

But I didn't take the extra step of kind of

like plugging into those extra organizations,

you know.

Namely,

I didn't know,

you know,

but there were...

Well,

that's not entirely true.

There were...

At the time in New York,

when I landed here,

there were a lot of like meetups.

It was kind of,

you know,

still the big thing like meetup.com.

I don't know if that's still...

If people are still doing that,

but,

you know,

that's another one that I was,

you know,

definitely,

you know,

they had these great GeoNYC meetups.

So you got to meet a lot of people and,

you know,

connect and do a lot of those different things.

So I find those organizations,

you know,

and there's quite a few of them.

The Geospatial Professional Network,

I'll use the,

you know,

formerly known as ERISA,

and,

you know,

even like the Cloud Native Geospatial Forum,

there's ways to connect and get in on top of these.

So,

you know,

that's definitely a good place to go.

So describe like kind of your day-to-day.

I know like you're kind of using a lot of the

Esri ecosystem.

What's your...

How do you do that?

What are you doing?

What's your views on kind of,

you know,

an Esri-centric kind of deployment?

And how do you...

What would you do with all that?

Yeah.

- Yeah,

no,

that's great.

And I'm actually...

I'm going to backtrack very briefly just what

we were speaking on earlier.

If you

happen to live in an area where there aren't

a lot of in-person meetups,

or you're not seeing Mappy Hours in your area,

or there just isn't because you're a one-stop

shop in a county of 30,000 people and you just

can't meet up with other people,

the space is online.

They really,

since the pandemic,

I mean,

there are ways to get plugged in and meet different

people.

And,

you know,

LinkedIn can be such a pain,

but it is a great tool.

At the end of the day,

it is a fantastic tool.

And there's a lot of,

like I said,

there's a lot of fanatics also in our industry

on LinkedIn.

It's a great way to,

you know,

hear

people's thoughts,

get their opinions on a whole host of things.

And

because our industry is growing and changing so quickly,

it's a great way to stay up to date with different

things.

You know,

they like to...

Esri likes to say they put,

you know,

30% of their profit back into research and development.

So if they are really researching and developing

30% of all of that revenue or profit,

you know,

I mean,

there's tons and tons and tons of things to

keep up with all

the time.

So now rolling that into what I do,

yes,

I mean,

we are,

we're an Esri shop.

We mainly use ArcPro

and an enterprise deployment to handle the

majority of our data.

That being said,

Esri is not the only tool in our tool belt.

We do a lot of other things.

We use a lot of different data manipulation

techniques and different things.

And I'm all about open source.

So when I can,

I like to...

Fact check isn't quite the right word,

but I like to do things twice.

Sometimes I like to do them first in an Esri

environment,

and then I do them again.

And in sort of an open source geospatial environment,

and then I,

you know,

I decide which one was easier and which makes

the most sense for us to continue down this process.

And so I think the one example that I had given

you when we spoke before

was about image classification

for building footprints.

And so you can build a nice little model in

Esri's ecosystem,

and you can run your imagery through it,

and it can pull out all of the...

You train it up,

and it pulls out all of the building footprints for you.

And then so what I did is I then tapped the

OpenStreetMap API.

Now that we can all work with...

Now that I can work with APIs,

okay,

I've been doing it for quite a few years,

but,

you know,

just to give a little callback.

So now that I have that ability,

I can just immediately boom,

pull in.

OpenStreetMaps has a building footprints data

layer that they maintain

that is extremely accurate.

I'm shocked that it's as up-to-date as it is in my town.

I live in a college town,

Bowling Green.

And so we

pretty constantly have things,

you know,

frat houses move,

or,

you know,

they build a new stadium.

And so I was

going,

and I was looking back,

and we hadn't done a building footprints analysis

probably for maybe three or four years anyways.

There was a new basketball arena that wasn't in there,

and Greek life had moved to a new location.

And so those

are a couple of my test areas.

And not only did Esri's process work 100% very fine,

but when I was able to check it against the

OpenStreetMaps API,

I was surprised to see how up-to-date that

their data was out there.

And so that's just one small example of being

able to guess and check and make use of multiple tools.

That's my main thing is that you don't ever

want to be solely reliant on Esri products.

I mean,

they have a fantastic ecosystem,

but it's a bit of a walled garden,

and it can be difficult to,

you know,

find a workaround or find another way to do

something if you,

for example,

incur an error 99999,

and you can't get any information out of the debug.

And you're like,

"What the heck?

I'm going to just go take this into Q,

and we're going to do it that way," you know,

because there's three plugins that say they

can do the same thing.

So let's start working through those processes,

you know?

And it's just having the ability to think differently

and to use a different option and to say,

"Maybe this is actually

easier," you know?

-

Right.

Yeah,

it's not one or the other,

which,

I mean,

it's a both or,

you know,

all.

So,

yeah.

I think having that,

you know,

hybrid approach is one thing I'm hearing a

lot from different folks in the market that are using

either side of the equation,

right?

You know,

more,

you know,

non-Ezra tools or Ezra tools.

They want to be able to integrate all these

pieces together.

So from someone who's done that successfully,

can you give a few other examples of how you're

doing that or,

yeah,

do

you have some real-world examples?

- Yeah.

I think the first thing that comes to mind

would be sort of a,

I guess,

this came off the back of not

necessarily cost-cutting,

but trying to be most cost-efficient.

We only have,

currently,

we have one,

like,

3D analyst license right now in my organization,

and I have it assigned to my

GIS analyst.

And so,

anytime that I need to make use of that package

instead of,

you know,

I could go in and turn it off for him and switch

it back over to my account and turn it on for me.

But instead of worrying about all that,

because he doesn't have such a strong background

in the open-source side of things,

I just let him use it.

And then,

anytime I need to do,

like,

say,

LiDAR analysis or generate some contours for a region,

and I would use the tools in that license package,

I just use open-source tools.

Usually,

I just use Q because the plugins are so nice,

but if I have to,

I'll pull it into Python and do some manipulations

there.

I try to,

I don't know,

I guess I do try to

stay in mapping interfaces when I can,

at least Q or Esri,

just because I think it sort of helps paint

the picture for

me.

But,

you know,

there's no reason why you couldn't just do

this solely in,

like,

a Jupyter Notebook or a JupyterLab or something

like that,

you know,

and generate the geometries in the output.

Anyways,

I just like to see the output in the UI.

So I tend to make use

of a lot of QGIS plugins,

especially in the cases where

we're not going to pay to buy another license.

You know,

there's open-source tools out here that can

do those things.

So,

yeah,

that's one of the main ways that we make use

of open-source is to sort of ease our burdens

on the back end and remain more efficient and

not have to swap licenses all the time.

Or worry about,

"Oh,

I got to call down to the guy in the auditor's

office and see if he's using this right now."

Or in Ohio,

we have auditors,

everybody else has assessors.

It's very

fun.

But I'll end it there,

at least on the integration portion.

Those are the main ways that we make use of open-source.

It's kind of just a stopgap,

but it's like I keep saying,

the more tools you have in the belt,

the better

you're going to be long-term to tackle any sort of

problem.

- Right.

And that's at the core of what

modern GIS should be,

right?

It's the interoperability or flexibility,

however you want to put that.

But the ability to move between tools,

between data sizes,

between datasets,

systems,

local cloud,

whatever that might be,

it allows for

each tool to do what it can do really well.

And I think that's one

thing that I notice

starting to take hold a little bit in geospatial

is that,

you know,

you don't have to be the end-all,

be-all,

this,

this.

You don't have to have,

you know,

kind of to pull back to a Tolkien reference,

one ring to rule them all.

You can have,

you

know,

many,

I

guess,

many

mythical rings to just keep going on that.

You can wear multiple ones and do different

things together and,

you know,

collaborate as it were.

So I like

hearing about that

and hearing that in practice.

And even going from,

you know,

we're not just talking about large organizations here,

we're talking about people doing this in,

you know,

governments of all sizes and scales,

you know.

So I think it's great to hear that.

Now,

getting back to education,

obviously,

you know,

this is one thing that came up quite a bit

when we were talking about how and what should

an education or a well-rounded geospatial education

look like.

I think there's a few points

that are,

you know,

I personally have that I think,

you know,

like,

but I've also,

I've been out of the game for a while.

I graduated in 2010,

so that's,

yikes,

15 years ago now.

So,

you know,

tell me,

you know,

from your perspective,

what

your take is on the state of GIS or geospatial

education.

- Yeah,

I think I touched on it a little bit earlier.

And again,

a lot of this,

you know,

we got to understand is from my anecdotal experience

and the way that I interacted with the GIS

courses I took in,

you know,

in my

undergrad.

But all that being said,

I think there is a little bit too much of a

reliance on the

ESRI products.

Like I said,

it's sort of a walled garden,

and they're doing a lot to remedy that,

and they're making,

you

know,

an ease of interoperability for file types

and different things.

Like one example I can give right now that's

fresh in my mind is there's a new integration

between ArcGIS Pro and AutoCAD,

Civil 3D for engineers.

And so,

I do a lot of work in our engineer's office.

That's technically

where I'm at,

my position is under.

And so,

we do a lot of sharing of geospatial data for

plans and presets.

And that's a beautiful backdoor that they just

created to share geospatial data with AutoCAD.

And I think that's a fantastic thing.

And ESRI needs to keep moving in that direction

where they're trying to bring other players in and say,

"Look,

you know,

we want...

If you have data in these other places,

we want you to be able to use it with our software

as well." So,

kind of getting a little bit off track there,

but

some other things that I would like to see

in a GIS coursework for an undergraduate would

just be a little bit of a stronger programming

data background.

And I think

it would be interesting to see courses allow

you to get a concentration.

So,

like for my data analytics background,

I have a concentration in geospatial data.

So,

that's why I took an increase in GIS

courses and those types of things.

But I would like to see it,

you know,

maybe being able to specialize whether you

want to be more

purely cartographic

or if you want to get into the computer science things,

maybe you can specialize in Python where you

see a track where you take a few additional

Python courses.

Or maybe you're more of a web development person,

so you take a couple of courses with

JavaScript and CSS and,

you know,

some of the more classic web development languages.

And then it just gives you an opportunity to

interact with those languages and see if it's

something you like,

you know?

You don't necessarily have to,

"Oh,

all of a sudden,

you know,

Python just isn't doing it for me.

Maybe I'm really not,

you know,

the programmer I thought I was." Or it's just,

you know,

it feels like I'm banging my head into a wall

every time I start to open up a new script

and it's just not working for you.

So,

you know,

it could help sort of guide somebody in their

path while they're in university and they don't

have to come out and then go,

"Oh,

God,

I wish I would have been learning this,

you know,

five years ago." - Yeah,

I had that,

a very

similar experience.

You know,

I came out of school and a lot of my work was

focused on the cartographic angle,

which is not the work I do today,

right?

It was cartographic design and then the interactive

or the programming part was through interactive mapping,

which was kind of the focus at the time.

What I learned I really liked to do was the

analytical work,

you know,

the data work.

And I didn't

know that.

I don't think that was,

like,

any fault of my program or anything like that.

I just think I didn't know what I didn't know yet.

And,

you

know,

what I did,

what I was

fortunate to come away with was a little bit

of understanding of programming languages.

I did have a massive amount

of work to pick

that up.

And I think I've told this story on parts of

the internet at different times,

but,

you know,

it was probably a little bit different from

you where I'm coming from the background.

I know the geospatial stuff and I learned it.

I understand it.

I took a lot of,

like,

the human geography stuff.

So I had this,

like,

kind of background in these pieces too,

but I had to pick up all the programming,

you know,

from scratch.

Trial and error,

medium

articles,

YouTube videos,

starts and stops on online courses,

you know,

you name it,

right?

And,

of course,

the whole time I was like,

"Do I need to go back to school to learn this

stuff?" I'm kind of like...

But every time I found myself asking that question,

I would kind of go benchmark against programs.

I'd say,

like,

"Well,

maybe I don't need to." And maybe,

you know,

it

always kind of feels like a chip on my shoulder.

I'm like,

"Well,

I don't...

I never went back for a master's or did I need

one or I don't know," you know?

So I kind of...

I agree that there should be more of those

pieces in those

programs,

you know,

either from a programming side should

you want to learn that or need to learn it.

I do believe it does

help from a salary perspective and those jobs

are generally pay a little bit more.

I'm not saying that's...

Not everyone needs that,

of course,

but as an

offering,

I believe that's there.

And I think,

like you said,

kind of having these concentrations that allow

people from other areas

of study within the university system to come

in and learn that as well,

you know,

pick up the pieces that they need for geospatial.

Maybe they just need a few things to do what

they need to do,

but they can actually do that and then go apply

it to whatever

work they're doing from different parts of,

you know,

a program.

So I think those things are there as well.

But to learn programming alone,

and you can tell me your perspective on this,

like I think there's a lot of that you can

learn kind of in,

you know,

on the job or professionally,

you know,

sort of through like,

professional learning endeavors,

be that online or whatever that is.

It's hard,

but I believe that that is doable.

I don't...

And what's your

take on something like that?

- Yeah,

absolutely.

I mean,

there's,

you know,

more resources than ever,

I think,

to learn programming on the fly.

And alongside of,

you know,

Copilot and these things that are built right

into GitHub or VizCode or whatever it is,

I mean,

you got these options where there's a lot more

hand-holding these days.

And I feel like it's a lot easier to pick it

up because you don't have to necessarily get

into debugging because the debug,

the error just tells you,

"Hey,

go to line 137.

You missed a comma,

dude." You know,

you're not going through and looking and being like,

"Where the heck is that one little curly brace

that I put in the wrong spot or needs to be

indented one more than it is," or whatever the case is,

you know?

So I do,

I think there is

less and less ability to fail to actually learn

programming than there ever has been before.

And I think one of the key reasons why people

fail is because early on,

they look at chapters one,

two,

and three in the free Python learning catalogs,

and they get bored.

They're like,

"I don't care about creating lists.

I don't need to..." you know,

because they don't understand what it can do eventually.

But I don't know.

I've had success in telling people to maybe

skip a few chapters ahead and learn to write

a basic function,

and then you kind of just sort of pick it up

all in one at that point.

And then if your function

is not 100% up to par,

you know,

you just dump it into one of these large language

models,

and you say,

"What the heck's going on here?" And it outputs

something,

and you use it,

and you bounce it back and forth.

And no,

I mean,

they don't write perfect code,

but their ability to help you understand code

that you might not necessarily understand is

pretty powerful.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Using the AI models and large language models is,

I think,

definitely a topic,

a whole other topic than that was...

But what I will say,

if anyone's,

you know,

curious,

should I use them?

Is that cheating?

Which I've certainly felt like I'm cheating

sometimes by doing that.

You know,

I think they're...

Use them as tools.

If you try to get them to write the code for you,

you will probably be hitting a lot of walls,

right?

But having a base understanding and being able

to apply that,

and then using that to accelerate your

work or help you solve a problem,

treat it

like a colleague or someone that you can bounce

an idea off of,

rather than

going through stack overflow links from five

years ago and trying to figure that out.

That's my high-level perspective on AI.

But I'm glad you brought that up as it is a

good tool to kind of sharpen your skills or help you

get around a problem and go faster.

So yeah,

we kind of talked,

I think,

what do you see changing or what things would be

good to change from your perspective in a GIS education?

It's so tough because,

you know,

people come into it with different ideas and

from different backgrounds and they want to

do different things with it.

You know,

if somebody is like,

"I want to make

National Geographic style maps," and that's

what they want,

and their idea is,

you know,

hardcore,

beautiful cartography and that's their thing,

you know,

the traditional track that we have right now

through a geography

department and program,

I think,

is fine.

You know,

there's nothing wrong with it.

But I do think that as GIS grows and grows

and geospatial grows and grows,

there's so much more of a reliance on understanding

the nitty-gritty in the back end.

So I would say an increase in database stuff,

you know,

more than just an SQL query builder,

let's actually understand how SQL works.

And then beyond that,

you know,

it's tough because there is no real,

like,

enterprise architecture

built into these universities.

But having a course that teaches you,

you know,

this is the web adapter and this is how the

web adapter works and how it interacts

with,

you know,

the server,

a federated server,

and how all of these things tie together.

I mean,

I just showed up to my first job that had an

enterprise deployment and had to learn on the fly,

you know?

So I'm going through Esri documentation,

trying to figure out how do all these things

link together?

Why does IT have my web adapter,

you know,

siloed on a separate server?

So this stuff isn't making sense.

And then,

you know,

starting to walk through and have a better

understanding of,

oh,

the reasons these are set up this way is because,

you

know,

you spun up a server that's not necessarily on-prem,

it's a virtual server and this and that.

And so there's so much back end stuff that

I think would be very beneficial to have somewhat

of an understanding of.

You don't have to be a database administrator.

You don't have to be an IT director.

You don't have to know everything ins and outs

about how computers transfer data,

share data,

store data.

But just to have,

you know,

somewhat of a peek behind

the curtain to where you're not just interacting

with data solely in a pretty UI,

I think would

just benefit our industry as a whole.

Yeah,

I agree.

I think getting

down to the data

level and understanding those

little fundamentals can help change things dramatically.

And even if you're not expressing that through code,

right,

even if you're expressing that through a UI or,

you

know,

a dashboard

or something like that,

it can

dramatically help how you do things and understand

how to make things more efficient,

right?

Because once you understand how,

you know,

the system works,

should you need to move to code?

Great,

you can,

but you can also improve

speed and performance in other places as well,

you know.

Little things like,

you know,

I don't need a geometry for every single row

if the things are repeating,

I can join that.

You know,

there's all these

little lessons that you can kind of learn along the way,

but that's important.

Can you talk a little bit about,

like,

you said you started with an associate's degree

and then moved into your four-year after that.

I know you're,

I'm assuming your associate's degree is not GIS related,

right?

No,

it was in psychology.

Got it.

What do you,

I mean,

having gone through a two-year program,

I personally think that there should be two-year

programs for GIS and geospatial.

What would your take on that be?

Yeah,

I think that,

I think if we had something like that set up

that was relatively accepted across the larger

United States,

we would see a huge increase in our local counties'

ability to work with this type of data.

I think that's one of the main hindrances is

that a lot of people,

whether they go and they just get their bachelor's

or they go and they get their bachelor's and

then they get a master's right after

it.

Once you've reached that step where you've

already got a master's,

you basically price yourself out of every entry-level

job at the county level,

you know what I mean?

Which is a perfect place to get your foot in the door.

You're only going to be doing 30 hours of work a week,

so you got 10 hours that you can learn and teach and,

you know,

try to understand more and more and more geospatial

things.

And so I think having a two-year degree would really,

really benefit those types of positions and

people who can then decide,

you know,

this is for me or,

you know,

hey,

I'm happy at the county level.

I can stay here,

write it out,

get my pension,

do whatever,

you know,

and they can just stay there.

Or they have the ability to say,

hey,

this is my passion.

I have passion about this.

I'd like to go back to school.

I'd like to continue with

maybe more of a pure cartography background or no,

I actually really enjoy manipulating data and

doing the analysis and driving decisions.

So I want to end up with more of a data-driven

background or a programming background.

I think,

yeah,

I would be a huge

proponent of something like that.

I would love to see that in our local community

colleges and two-year accredited schools and stuff.

But they do exist.

I,

a few,

maybe two years ago,

I went through and tried to make a list of

all the programs that I could find for geospatial

in the US and they are out there.

So it's certainly,

but you know,

it's not the norm.

And I think it would be cool to see what that

could do to our industry as well.

On the same token,

certifications,

things like GISPs,

stuff like that.

How do you see those impacting the landscape today?

Yeah,

the GISP is a really,

really interesting one for me,

especially,

I guess,

sort of,

coming into GIS a little bit later than most people.

So right when I graduated from high school

is when they decided that the GISP was going

to be more than just a portfolio review.

I believe that was 2015 was when that changed.

So most people who have a GISP pre-2015 were

basically grandfathered in.

They didn't have to take the test.

They didn't have to provide a portfolio and

have it reviewed by the GISP Institute or whatever

they're calling themselves.

Now there is 120 question tests and you get whatever,

60 minutes,

90 minutes,

something to that effect.

So there is a testing

portion.

And I've heard from peers and young professionals

like myself,

I think we kind of get a little bitter about

it because we weren't grandfathered in.

And now we have to take a test where I've heard there's

things as wonky as trying to calculate projections

by hand.

No idea if that's true.

I'm sure that's some fear mongering behind all this.

But

the one thing

that I would say is I'm not particularly drawn

to getting a GISP out of my own pocket.

I think if my work was willing to back that,

it's absolutely something that's going to look

good on your resume.

But it's such a niche thing that unless

your hiring manager is a geospatial person,

the odds of them recognizing the GISP and understanding

what it actually means and the value it derives

I think is less and less.

If you're looking at two resumes and somebody

has a GISP and somebody has a PMP,

project management certification,

I personally I think from my experience,

they're going to go with,

"Oh,

I know that this person has project management

experience and they've gotten a certificate

and they've gone through that." And it's going

to be a little bit stronger than the GISP is

given if it's an incredibly spatial,

geospatial job,

then yes,

maybe they might be looking out for that.

But it's one of those that kind of rides the line.

It's difficult to get

back to organizations.

Like I know ERISA is very involved with the GISP and

they like to promote it and they always bring

a table out to have them

there.

And it's just interesting.

You'll come into these different places where

people will tell you different things about

it and at the end of the day,

you have to make your own decision on which

certification is right for you and what you

intend to do with the rest of your career.

But it puts us at an

interesting crossroads,

I would say,

as geospatial folk.

And I would be,

not that I want to promote some sort of

uprising or something to rival it,

but I would be interesting to see what other

sort of certifications could come in the future

and could have the backing of some sort of

larger institutions.

Like there's really nothing

that gives the GISP any power.

It's not an ASCI,

it's not part of the Bar Association,

it's not backed by any of the engineering associations.

So I would like to see something that has more

accreditation to it that would eventually create

a stronger certificate.

But again,

if the opportunity arises for me to get one,

I absolutely would get one.

I do think they carry water right now as is.

Yeah,

mean,

it speaks to

the,

there are

organizations out there that you

can start to join and work with

in the professional setting,

right?

I think that

what's happened in my mind is I think our space

has just evolved

and all the concentric circles around GIS,

from geospatial,

cloud native,

programming,

all these things have just started

to grow and they need their own support system too.

And frankly,

that's why I got in.

I'm sure this is why you are discussing and

sharing all the great things that you are as well.

It's kind of why I got started too,

because

there wasn't those conversations happening.

There certainly are events,

there's Phosphor G and they have a great kind

of event every year in different parts of the world.

So these things

happen.

But I just didn't see that

carried in a way that I was like,

okay,

I can learn and relate from that.

And I think that's kind of the,

if I had to pinpoint anything,

how do we start to formalize the results that

people can get from learning those things?

And that's what I would love to see start to happen.

That is really interesting.

And that's how I initially came across you

and your videos,

was because I was searching for something more.

I was looking for a little bit of a more granular

take on some of those circles that are growing,

because I sort

of saw,

hey,

wait a minute,

I don't really know

exactly what I'm doing with that.

I should learn it.

And

starting to jump around and find places where

I can get involved and learn those things that

grow or that are continuing to grow.

And as technology grows,

our industry is going to just,

like you said,

more and more and more and more,

and it's never going to stop.

The continuing ed will go on forever.

So it's not like you're ever going to create a

perfect undergraduate GIS program.

It won't exist,

but we can

narrow and we can get a little bit more of

a finer scope,

especially with things like concentrations

and things like we touched

on.

For sure.

Well,

we covered a lot of ground.

I think it's

really cool to hear your background,

like I said,

coming from an outside perspective,

doing this,

learning it,

being

successful,

and then understanding

how to weave two worlds together,

really,

is kind of,

you know,

from the GIS world and the broader data analytics world,

bringing those two things and creating a balance

and then how we can actually educate and share

that forward.

I think it's a really good vision.

And I think,

you know,

understanding how to do that across all the

places that need professionals in our field,

you know,

and you're certainly an example,

a very good example of that.

So I appreciate,

you know,

taking

the time.

Anything else that you wanted to leave the

folks with today?

Yeah,

you know what,

Ana,

just popped into my head.

I don't think I brought it up when we were

speaking about associations.

I know I mentioned,

you know,

if you're in a rural area,

you don't have an association

close to you.

I would encourage you to start one.

We actually,

I'm a founding board member of the County Geospatial

Association of Ohio.

We started in August

of 2023.

And by October of 2023,

we had over 75 of the 88 counties in Ohio,

70 to 75.

Don't quote me on that.

But you know,

we saw a huge,

there's an appetite out there for folks around

you that want to get into geospatial and want

to learn more and want to be involved.

So I would

encourage you,

you know,

if you're out there and you're like,

there's nobody in whatever,

Northwest Mississippi,

you know,

start up an organization and start a user group

and see who you can get involved.

You might surprise yourself.

There's folks out there that want to learn and,

and are always willing to,

you know,

contribute as their time allows.

So that's really all I have.

Thanks,

Matt.

I really appreciate you allowing me this opportunity

and bringing me on and keep doing what you're doing.

Your work is fantastic.

I love

it.

I can't get enough.

Awesome.

Well,

I appreciate that.

I appreciate you.

And yeah,

thank you again.

And until next time,

we'll talk soon.

Awesome.

Take care.