Surveyors morph into space cadets
Jill Rowbotham
From: The Australian July 21, 2010 12:00AM
University of NSW professor Chris Rizos heads the spatial information program.
Picture: Alan Pryke
Source: The Australian
NUMBERS of surveying graduates have halved since the 1980s, setting up the discipline for a critical shortage in the proliferating number of industries it serves.
These fields include the traditional ones such as mapping and defining land boundaries, but also newer, hi-tech surveying that requires skills in spatial information systems, which has a heavy IT component.
The industries that use these are growing at double-digit rates due to the increasing use of mobile devices and their applications, the growth in digital mapping applications on the web, and the interest in mapping and spatial information by traditional IT and telco companies including Nokia and Google.
Chris Rizos, head of the University of NSW school of surveying and spatial information systems, says despite potentially exciting and lucrative careers in both the established and the newer sides of surveying, there is a serious image problem.
"Surveying is perceived as old-fashioned, almost craft or technician-like, with an emphasis on the outdoors," he says. "Not cool at all.
"With these negative perceptions unfortunately, we then struggle to promote careers in the non-surveying industry, that is, the spatial information industry."
He estimates there are only about 150 graduates annually from Australian universities, forcing employers to hire, for example, New Zealand surveyors to work in general surveying, and South African mine surveyors.
Although experts in the spatial information field can come from geography or computer science backgrounds, employers prefer them to have a basic surveying degree, supplemented with IT subjects.
"It is apparently easier to retrain a surveying graduate to learn about IT, than it is to retrain an IT graduate to understand co-ordinates and reference frames."
Rizos says that given the proliferation of satellites with remote sensing capabilities, and the rising interest in sustainability, climate change mitigation and adaptation, addressing global problems and inequities, "we need a new breed of geographer cum surveyor cum IT professional".
"So we have a challenge in bringing all this together into convenient sound bites for the current crop of high school students."
This year Rizos's school established two degrees, one in traditional surveying, the other in geoinformation systems.
"Several other universities in Australia are doing the same, and we hope we will be able to simplify our messages so that they resonate with the different groups of students," the professor says.
> "Surveying is perceived as old-fashioned, almost craft or technician-like, with an emphasis on the outdoors," he says. "Not cool at all.
>
> "With these negative perceptions unfortunately, we then struggle to promote careers in the non-surveying industry, that is, the spatial information industry."
LOL!
