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.
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.
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.
I think the first question to ask is if the button pusher even wants to move beyond that. Plenty of guys are just happy to be running around outside.
For those who want to progress beyond button pushing, pretty much all of the resources needed are available in some form or other. One problem being a lack of understanding of how/where to search for the information.
In my best grumpy old guy voice - "I remember back in my day we were being taught where to go to find information. Now these dang kids have all the information you could hope for at the tip of their fingers and they don't know how to find it."
Young people - that was just a joke!! But it is made to point out that we (young and old alike) now have access to so much information, yet many people still have trouble finding what they are looking for. Perhaps too much information makes it difficult to weed through.
"For those who want to progress beyond button pushing, pretty much all of the resources needed are available in some form or other. One problem being a lack of understanding of how/where to search for the information."
For the newbie who has questions, it can be hard to know which questions to ask first or even how to formulate their questions.
"In my best grumpy old guy voice – “I remember back in my day we were being taught where to go to find information. Now these dang kids have all the information you could hope for at the tip of their fingers and they don’t know how to find it.”
Young people – that was just a joke!! But it is made to point out that we (young and old alike) now have access to so much information, yet many people still have trouble finding what they are looking for. Perhaps too much information makes it difficult to weed through."
I agree that too much information can be overwhelming. Our role as supervisors (trainers) includes pointing our employees toward the resources they aren't aware of. Better yet, we can evaluate those resources and recommend the best ones. Our junior employees may not yet have the understanding to distinguish between good and mediocre information in our field.
I don't care how many employees work at your company; if you're not spending a minimum of 80 hours a year, keeping up with technology, you're doing it wrong.
training for button pushers - shovel stomping.
As one grumpy old man, let me translate the last post from another grumpy old man (Norm).
While there has been a lot of very good suggestions, none of it is very useful if the button pusher doesn't know what he or she should be measuring to, or even how to find or recognize corner and other boundary evidence.
There have been many times that I needed to send a crew back out to due to the lack of complete or adequate measurements, and most of what has already been suggested in this thread speaks to that. More often, "corner search" meant waving a metal detector around and after 5 unsuccessful minutes, declaring "Searched, Not Found". If the last record of a visit to the corner was when the GLO set a stone, built a mound or set a post, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that a crew's first search would result in "SNF".
Another excellent point made earlier in the thread was to 1st find out if the button pusher has a desire to learn anything new. I've had the pleasure of passing on knowledge to younger surveyors but I've also wasted a lot of time and energy trying to teach those who have no interest in learning.
When a crew misses boundary evidence, I've found that it has been sometimes because they didn't know what to look for but just as often it was due to laziness or not wanting to learn what to look for.
The last place I worked at and I parted ways because I found it too difficult to get them up to mediocre and they found it too expensive to put in more than a mediocre effort.
There's a lot of different things that are important for your field techs to learn that will help them advance in valuable knowledge. Among those, I think that the order of importance is 1) that they know what to measure to and how to recognize it, 2) how to properly document what they found, 3) how to do that to achieve reliable measurements, and lastly 4) how to do each of those more efficiently and thoroughly.
How do you teach experience…
This is a relevant question. Experience only results in skill if it is acquired in the correct context.
Accountability, and sharing information helps a lot.
As the leader, if you only have button pushers, then it is up to you to make the difference.
Examples:
If you send a crew out with a worksheet with just points on it, you are robbing the crew and yourself. My first chief of parties demanded that the project surveyors provide the relevant documents, including: surveys, deeds, descriptions, plans, and provide the context to get from those documents to the worksheet.
I talk in another thread about the crew walking the surveyed boundary with a video. If you do this, you get to spend 15 minutes walking through a boundary with a crew whenever you want. Critiques, feedback, etc.
Go out with your crew. Determine if they know the how and why. Teach them.
I think the first question to ask is if the button pusher even wants to move beyond that.
They are the first laid off.
While there has been a lot of very good suggestions, none of it is very useful if the button pusher doesn’t know what he or she should be measuring to, or even how to find or recognize corner and other boundary evidence.
Late to the discussion, but the simple answer is to progress they need to be taught why when they are being taught how.
