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Training for button pushers
In your opinion, what skill training do our land surveying technicians need to progress beyond being button pushers? Or, stated another way …
What kind of skill training is most needed (and in short supply) among the land surveying technicians you know?
Background: I present continuing education seminars and provide technician training events for the land surveying industry. (Taught land surveying at a community college for 25 years). For due diligence purposes, it’s best that I question my own assumptions and get input from y’all.
I’m eager to learn your opinions. Thanks in advance for sharing.
Todd
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33 Replies
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In your opinion, what skill training do our land surveying technicians need to progress beyond being button pushers?
- Field procedures for GNSS. Specifically, RTK procedures.
- Combining GNSS observations and total station data collection.
- How to determine a right-of-way after observing existing points using a SPC system.
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How do you teach experience…
I hope everyone has a great day; I know I will! -
Knowing the right tools for the project and knowing the ins and out of the tools they are using.
Don’t be afraid to explore the software/hardware. – While this varies with the specific employer, I always push my crews to explore the software completely. This works in the office and field.
Learn the office side simultaneously with the field side. I believe this creates much better techs and future professionals.
If you don’t know, ask.
Accuracy over speed, all the time.
Understanding the job/project.
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It seems that many of the technicians are working construction, and more contractors are doing their own surveying. (some without PLS?)
You might do the best job training technicians, but when their supervisor(s) are lacking, it’s a problem.
How about we get a larger portion of PLS that can perform an apropriate right-of-way determination, or vaguely understand SPCs?
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This reply was modified 2 months, 4 weeks ago by mulambda382.
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This reply was modified 2 months, 4 weeks ago by
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What @WA-ID Surveyor said is pretty much my sentiment on the subject.
What @RADAR said about teaching experience gets at another facet of the issue: experience without understanding is meaningless (“you don’t have 20 years of experience, you have 1 year of experience 20 times over“), and so is conceptual knowledge without application (“you studied these concepts for five years in a lab under controlled conditions but have no idea what to do when in the real world“).
Only technical/conceptual knowledge plus real-world application results in knowledgeable, competent, problem-solving surveyors.
You might do the best job training technicians, but when their supervisor(s) are lacking, it’s a problem.
Amen. The next big step after developing competent surveyors is to maintain those surveyors. So, so many licensees just….stop learning…or at minimum, fail to keep up with developments in our profession.
It doesn’t help that at firms with enough staff to merit formal training and mentorship programs, leadership often simply point a finger at their employees and say “you should know this“. While the employee/individual certainly should take the initiative and bear principal responsibility, a firm that doesn’t incentivize learning and growing, and support the same, is a firm that will find its turnover rate high and its quality lacking.
“…people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” -Neil Postman -
If a company, any company, isn’t spending a minimum of 80 hours a year on training; they’re doing it wrong…
The only thing we can count on in change
I hope everyone has a great day; I know I will! -
IMO, you train people for the next level above where they currently are, so that they understand what is done with their work product. Once they have that they will self train for their current level, or at least be more receptive to constructive criticism. Or not, in which case they never advance.
In a nutshell that means training your button pushers to be CAD techs, your CAD techs to be survey techs/LSITs, and so on.
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If a company, any company, isn’t spending a minimum of 80 hours a year on training; they’re doing it wrong…
Oh if only we could get to eight hours…
AEC firms are incredibly gun-shy when it comes to researching and implementing automation and efficiency, so until they streamline the other parts of their operations (accounting, IT, BD/marketing), there’s precious little room left over for non-billable things related to actually doing the work.
“…people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” -Neil Postman -
“Oh if only we could get to eight hours…”
Perhaps Radar meant 80 hours total for 10 employees?😉
I agree with Radar that training, and lots of it, will pay off in spades. I also agree with you, Rover, that hardly any survey/engineering company commits to it – particularly for the lower level people who need it most. The answer, I suppose, is mentoring – which is another way of saying “training on the fly”.
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This reply was modified 2 months, 4 weeks ago by Norman_Oklahoma.
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This reply was modified 2 months, 4 weeks ago by
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“you train people for the next level above where they currently are”
My cousin told me this was explained to him in Marine Corps OCS as “Always know your bosses’ job – in our line of work everyone is one bullet away from a promotion”
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Teaching that math has minimal relevance to boundary surveying.
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While I have evolved from the tape and optical transit of the early 80’s, one thing has always held firm in my old school thinking. While pushing buttons to store data or run software routines in the field is most times a blessing, it is often a curse.
In my days of running field crews we have gone from 3, to 2, and now increasingly to 1 man field crews. When times are good, we are all extremely busy and the 3 man crew basically doesn’t exist anymore. The diminishing number of crew members takes away the time that a PC used to have to teach what is being done, why it’s being done the way it’s being done, and how to best accomplish a task using best practices.
What we’ve ended up doing, through technology, is producing pocket computer operators that are truly missing out on what a real surveyor is. No longer can we send a PC into the field with a deed tax map, record deed and old survey and have them return their work and calc sheets for review before going straight to drafting.
Real field surveying is getting lost to technology in the field.
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@ MightyMoe This right here. It also needs to be taught to some surveyors as well.
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This reply was modified 2 months, 4 weeks ago by Webbed feet.
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This reply was modified 2 months, 4 weeks ago by
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Teaching math has minimal relevance to boundary surveying? Does one just wander aimlessly, hoping to trip over a corner marker in the woods?
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The 1-person crew, which is a reality that is not going away, requires us to not only change the way we staff the field data collection but to rethink the entire process of surveying from start to finish. It does no good to pine about the good old days.
I should point out here that the PCs of olden times didn’t have the capacity to video conference with the PLS in their pockets, and the new eager beavers didn’t have thousands of instructional youtube videos at their fingertips.
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This reply was modified 2 months, 4 weeks ago by Norman_Oklahoma.
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This reply was modified 2 months, 4 weeks ago by
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I have always maintained an open mind for participation in everyday aspects of the project. You never know where good ideas will come from. Sometimes the most inexperienced will contribute an idea or an insight that is helpful.
There are too many parts of a project to focus on some sort of list. The best part of the problem is working toward a determination. That can come by just paying attention.
I don’t know any button pushers on my team. The best experiences have alway been where everyone is encouraged to participate.
Historic Boundaries and Conservation Efforts -
I completely disagree with that, almost nobody is walking around with flip phones, they are no longer supported these days. On a smart phone, which almost everybody has, there is access to Teams, Zoom and face time, none of which are complicated.
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I can remember being a very green rod man when we had an older distomat to shoot to a triple prism set up and only on roads because it had to be hooked up to the truck battery. After a few months of this I went out and bought a 12 volt motorcycle batterie and an army surplus shoulder pouch to carry it in. When I brought it into the office, it blew everybody away that nobody had ever thought about that.
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Wow some great insights here from some very smart people.
I will try and add a few things that I did with my crews and it went against the grain of how things were done when I arrived. These data collectors are so powerful yet most work flows I see is mostly office driven. That means they use them to collect information or are given the information data to set out. I would take rainy days to teach the understanding of what the machine was doing even simple things like inverse. I taught how it was done long hand. I would create scenarios of things such as how to perform bearing bearing intersects project a point to a line area etc. what was going on with GNSS RTK how to understand the mean angles of direct and reverse. Computing coords from bearings and distance both long hand and in the data collector. We might take a plat assume a set of coordinates and use bearings and distance to get closure. Then how to use those same bearings to compute the interior exterior angles between them in the DC as they found a couple mons to aid in searching for the rest. Yes translate rotate but I wanted my guys to be able to use all tools in the toolbox and use what made sense to them in any situation for boundaries construction staking location of things that were offset or not able to get something positioned by say a standard offset method but could tape in points that they could prove were good in order to derive at the point that was needed. So I guess some old school ways utilizing the power they had. But as I could not make them experts in math over night I could teach them the understanding so they knew about what the answer should look like.
Of course I ate crow a few times as mistakes were made. But I took that on my shoulders as they were doing what I taught them. Or attempting too. I was on a job with one of my guys. I didn’t have my glasses so he was reading the bearings and distance and curve data to me on a boundary as I was trying to nail down a corner that I knew should be in but it was next to rail road tracks and in a area where old pieces of track was stacked and lots of trash all making for digging up everything but the kitchen sink . Once I had found other pins we came back to that area and we had written down the error in the other lines so I had an idea of how close math magically I could get to the monument. I was computing where it should have been as he read the information to me and I flipped a direction in my head so I dug a nice whole pretty deep. He said hey while you were digging I projected that comp point to the ROW of rail road we mapped out and we are several feet off. So I had him re read everything and re comped and I unversed the first point I comped to the 2nd and said well let me dig over here. We found the monument and he used what tools I had taught him to check and found my blunder. That’s what I think is best. Get them understanding and not just pushing buttons. Yes the assembly line and just do this works for speed. But it doesn’t prepare them for later on. So teach teach teach.
It drives me bonkers how I hear in the office from people we don’t let them do that they don’t know how to do that this is why we do things this way . To me it’s showing those who are in charge or in the office have not done their jobs to train and teach. Some have no desire to teach nor want to. I have a few friends I have developed relationships with through kids activities and a few of them were down right good surveyors at one time. They loved the technology but had started out doing the work in the field. Making decisions performing computations. They all left surveying when those in office decided we can do it all from here we just need grunts on the ground. One guy runs a successful construction business and does most all of his own layout and said he just stopped having fun when it became so office derived. He said he did cad and all but was still young enough to want to be in the field. Got his LSIT at that time and was pursuing licensing but saw what was going on and no one was mentoring or teaching anymore so he just made a decision. It’s simple we humans love to learn period. It’s often the way we are taught that we get attitudes sometimes. All of my crews had different personalities and strengths and weaknesses. It was my job to determine how to get them all being better which now they are doing great and I am no longer there to help. But we all stay in touch. One is a LS the other is up and coming. The others are doing well also.
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