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
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.
How do you teach experience…
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
"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".
"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"
Teaching that math has minimal relevance to boundary surveying.
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.
@ MightyMoe This right here. It also needs to be taught to some surveyors as well.
Teaching math has minimal relevance to boundary surveying? Does one just wander aimlessly, hoping to trip over a corner marker in the woods?
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.
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.
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.