the top investments for geospatial professionals 🌱

If you've got concerns about the market and the state of the economy you aren't alone. According to Gallup,  "The percentage of Americans calling current conditions "poor" has risen eight percentage points in June to 54% -- the first time a majority has called conditions poor since 2009."

Perhaps you, like many other professionals are looking for better investments for what you have left at the end of the month.

Warren Buffett once said "By far the best investment you can make is in yourself."

tools

Before you start any project, side hustle or portfolio project you are going to need some tools. One of my absolute favorites is notion. With a free personal plan (the plan was upgraded over the pandemic to include free unlimited pages), and a paid $5 a month personal pro plan that includes unlimited uploads, Notion is one of the best investments you can make for project management, organization, budgets, and more. If you are working with a group of people, or in a collaborative environment, the teams accounts start at $10 a month and are unlimited as well.

Software is another excellent investment. If we are going to talk strictly about visualizations, Canva (paid monthly plan) and Affinity ($50 one time payment) are some great tools to edit graphics for bl0gs, newsletters, reports and creating content.

start or upgrade your portfolio

If you have started a portfolio yet, they are crucial to any work or advancement in the GIS field. If you already have a portfolio, you might consider adding additional features to collect freelance clients or sell products (e-books, tutorials, walled content, scrips, data, or templates).

You might consider a few projects to pad your portfolio and challenge yourself over the week with Frontend Mentor. While these challenges are geared toward web development, a balanced portfolio will help keep you relevant in a rapidly changing market.

Regardless if it's a blog tracking your work or a simple way to share your work with potential clients or employers the ability to showcase your work sets you apart. A great place to start is Github pages. All you have to do is create your page and your work is sharable via a link.

Want to star your own page? I've got a simple step by step tutorial up on Youtube.

classes and courses

the world of geospatial is changing and developing rapidly, to stay up to date, you have to continue to train. If you are looking specifically for geospatial software classes, there's no better place to start than the Esri Training Catalog. While Esri isn't the be all end all the training offered has expanded over the years to include more geospatial generalist classes that include titles such as a free hour course on how to "Visualize Construction Planning in 3D", a overview on ways to "Predict Coral Bleaching Events", and an "Image Analysis for Defense and Intelligence" a two day instructor led course.

These courses range in price, time in the classroom, instructor or self taught and are for all skill levels. I've personally found the free Esri moocs to be extremely valuable to keeping my skills up to date while helping to improve my resume. I made a video on it not too long ago if you want more details on how moocs operate.

the harvest of your efforts

while we all are still searching for that golden investment opportunity, the biggest way to secure more opportunity and room to grow for the future is to get your income up. With more income, you free time, money, and energy to create new projects and new ideas. Once you can break free from that, you see the dividends in everything. Don't underplay small consistent steps that lead to the big changes over time.

Invest in yourself, and "Trust the Process"