Why Online GIS Certificate Programs offer a promising career path

The Geographic Information Systems (GIS) career path is proving to be extremely lucrative. The market size is expected to grow from USD 8.1 billion in 2020 to USD 14.5 billion in 2025. Due to the need for timely decisions for disaster management such as forest fire management,  flood management, CO2 management, and smart city planning, there has been a significant development of GIS data collection, analysis, and web reporting tools. All these contributing factors have caused a shortage of talent, GIS salaries to rise, and abundant employment opportunities as seen in our GIS Jobs Report, 2023. 

What is GIS Programs?

GIS software is made up of tools that can retrieve, exhibit, manage and analyze all data connected to a location.  If you think about it, this is the majority of all data collected such as: the US Forest Service managing a forest habitat, your city issuing infrastructure work orders, or anything communicated through your smartphone.  It allows individuals to create an interactive query and evaluate the outcome by creating a visual analysis.  The most notable example is the map dashboard of COVID-19 worldwide deaths produced by Johns Hopkins university.

GIS Programs Online is growing worldwide

Global challenges require large scale decision management by everyone. The world’s fastest growing economies have the biggest GIS markets. North America, Canada and the United States are the largest due to investments by the government sector.  In Europe, United Kingdom and France have the largest markets. And finally China and India make up the largest GIS markets due to the development of smart cities in Asia. The GIS industry is projected to be worth about $18B by 2023. This growth is attributed to the combination of needs in geographic decisions, faster computing, and more available data.

Why you should invest in a GIS Training career path

Without even realizing it we use GIS in our lives daily.  We use it to check traffic in a certain direction, to check the Covid-19 map that shows cases in our vicinity, and to locate crime in certain areas. Beyond our personal use GIS is used in many commercial ways such as precision agriculture, drone mapping, crime mapping, and construction mapping. Hence GIS proves to be a very diverse and popular industry where you could advance your career with a gainful income.

The average GIS Analyst salary in Boston, MA is $65,613 as of May 27, 2021 and the average GIS specialist salary in the United States is around $63,000 annually. So even if you have degrees in other topics, if you add GIS technical skills to your portfolio there are opportunities within GIS jobs to help manage data and run analytics in a wide variety of organizations.

Marketable Online GIS courses that could kickstart your career

• Leveraging GIS for Disaster Risk Reduction: If you want to be involved in the development of your city, county, province to prepare a safer community in terms of disaster management this is the course you should look into. 
• Forest Planning: If you’re passionate about the environment and would like to advance your career by involving yourself with a federal or state forest. The US Forest Service manages 193 million acres and is required to inform internal and external stakeholders within this process. This class is for those that want to learn how GIS is implemented in large scale plans. 
• Leveraging UAV (drone) Data for Environmental Projects:  Would you like to gain field data collection skills within the UAV industry that is rapidly growing to a projected $64B annual spend? Certificate in GIS online shows you how to be the Drone/GIS expert and generate value for your environmental projects. 

With an expected growth to 14.5 billion in 2025, it is clear that GIS is involved in every piece of decision management of our society.  This is because it is easy to make decisions when you can see what is happening where.  This tech focus can be an add-on to your studies no matter what field you are in.  So grab your health, environment, or business data and earn a GIS certificate with GIS analysis and architect skills. This will make you integral to your organization’s business missions.