Participation Activity #1 (GIS4102- GIS Programming)

The article I found is titled “GIS Jobs of Today: Should you have programming skills?” and can be found here.


This article takes a look into the GIS job market with how programming can be a valuable skill and whether or not education should include programming. Those who posses competency in a programming language tend to make higher salaries and are more valuable employees overall. But those to obtain either a certificate or degree for GIS might not be introduced to any sort of programming language. The article states that out of 55 departments that were surveyed, 10% of these required students to take a programming course. Individual mileage will also vary, depending on the extent the language such as Python, is taught. At the same time, education tends to be broad and attempts to cover many subjects to give their students the most exposure possible. Fine tuning one's knowledge for Python, for instance, takes plenty of personal dedication to learn the language. With our experience within this course, we will only cover the basics and skim the surface of what's possible with the language. Sure, what we take away will have real world uses, but proficiency can't come from taking one course. I found this article interesting since many of us will be taking these GIS skills to the job market and what's expected of us will vary.  

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