Many of you may have seen the NCEES email announcing they published their new SQUARED publication showing the number of exam takers, pass rates and number of licenses per state.
http://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Squared-20141.pdf
I like to review and compare the numbers of licenses across the country as well as check out the pass rates. It would be interesting to compare the number of PLS's against the number of Properties that exist in a state.
Here is a rough comparison of population per state against Resident PLS per state.
..........................NC...............OR...............% Lower
Population........9944000......3970000..........40%
Resident PLS.....2003...........758.................38%
No matter the statistics, it seems like some of the east coast states have quite a saturation of surveyors.
Cheers
Shoot, in my little town of 10,000 we have 3 surveying companies alone!
Then next door in the bustling burg of Orleans, the local shopping town, there are at least 5 more companies!
Only one in the town just south where spledeus has his office.
Talk about saturation!
Let's look at this a different way. In North Carolina, there's 1 surveyor for 4964 people while in Oregon, there's 1 surveyor for 5237 people. Because the state population figures look like they've been rounded to at least the nearest 100 people, we're probably left with both states having 1 surveyor per 5000 people!
New Jersey has 737 instate licenses and 183 out of state
Using only the instate:
- Per the State Tax Department there are 3,200,000 parcel in the State of New Jersey.
That's 1 Surveyor per every 4,300 parcels. - Per the US Census NJ's population is 8,938,175.
That's 1 Surveyor for every 12,127 residents. - New Jersey has an area of 8729sq mi or 5,586,560 ac.
That's 1 Surveyor for every 7,580 ac.
While these numbers are interesting, it does not represent the amount of work that can be done. A Land surveying firm can run from a solo firm to a firm running numerous crews, all with only one license.
Ha. I've also looked at those stats and wondered. One, is there a surveying Shangri-La lurking out there somewhere, and two, is there a formula that can be used to find it?
My best guess is that you take the number of licensees and divide by the state's GDP.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics...... Disraeli 😉
TNAI
In NC there are a number of out of state registrants, last two years those GIS persons who were grandfathered in under the new, GIS is surveying, some who work specifically for construction companies for layout, sky guys for aerial survey, and so forth.
Five years ago the average age of the PLS in NC was/is 55 years of age.
NC is not officially a licensing state that has varying levels or sub-specialties but, it is unofficially. The recent GIS persons grandfathered in as a PLS were "unofficially" warned not to be practicing outside their area of expertise.
> Let's look at this a different way. In North Carolina, there's 1 surveyor for 4964 people while in Oregon, there's 1 surveyor for 5237 people. Because the state population figures look like they've been rounded to at least the nearest 100 people, we're probably left with both states having 1 surveyor per 5000 people!
That ratio holds up fairly well in Texas, too. The 2013 population estimate was 26.51 million and the Bureau of Labor Statistics gave 4970 as the number of surveyors in Texas at that time. 1:5334.
i've heard there are only about 2700 active registered surveyors in TX (maybe i heard wrong), but that would put up to about 1 per 10,000.
i know that there are less than ten of the first thousand still alive and a group of them up to # 3000 are also RIP, but the registration numbers are up in the 6000+ range now. maybe there is close to 5000 active TX RPLS, but i don't think so.