Week 10 - Geospatial Careers

Class Date: Thursday, 29th September, 2011

This week Prof. Shortis stepped aside and handed over the floor to three guest speakers. Claire Davies from Geomatic Technologies, Damian Smale of Breese Pitt Dixon and Colin Hall of the Surveyor General's Office. The first two speakers looked at life in the workplace and the third at a quality management aspect of the surveying industry.
Claire Davies is a graduate of the University of Melbourne who initially worked with Thiess before shifting to her current job. Her talk was interesting because it was from the perspective of someone who is at the second stage of their career. She had established herself at Thiess from 2005 to 2011 and has only recently moved into the role of business analyst at Geomatic Technologies. Her role at Thiess looked challenging and demanding and I can understand her desire to move on. A comment of hers that stood out for me was that the technology that we use at university quickly becomes redundant due to the rate of development and adoption within the industry. To me it highlights the importance of a strong theoretical grounding so that you don't confuse the tool with the process.
Damian Smale is a recent graduate of RMIT who is aiming to become a licensed cadastral surveyor. From his presentation it is easy to see that he is a focussed individual. He spoke from the position of a recent graduate and offered workplace advice from this perspective. The two pieces of advice that I noted were that we are not expected to know everything and to be proactive in furthering our career. The first piece of advice is useful as it reminds me that the end of of university is a starting point, not a finishing point. The second highlights that often our interests will be secondary to those of the workplace we end up. Unlike university, the workplace does not exist to service us so in order to get where we want to go we have to take responsibility upon ourselves.
Colin Hall was the third speaker. The focus of his speech was the auditing program that is run from the Surveyor General's Office. This is a quality management program put in place to maintain the integrity of the cadastre. In my opinion a program like this can only improve the industry. By being conscious of the fact that your work is inevitably going to be checked at some point it encourages you to abide by the regulated standards. Well, the theory seems sound. Mr. Hall showed us that they have never been able to hit their desired result of 90% satisfactory surveys in one year. It seems to be floating at around the 80% mark. He also pointed out that only around 2% of the surveys get audited. This implies that of the 98% of unaudited surveys two out of every ten will have a notable error on them. This is definitely something to keep in mind.
I believe that I shall get to go out on audits next year and I look forward to it. It appears to be an excellent way to learn about surveying techniques and expectations. And the knowledge pool within the office appears to be very deep indeed.

Week 9 - Duncan Brooks and Emotional Intelligence

Class Date: Thursday, 22nd September, 2011

Mr. Duncan Brooks is an RMIT surveying graduate who has forged a career as an industry leader in spatial data. He is the acting director of Spatial Information Infrastructure (SII) at DSE. His talk covered both the information that his department is custodian of, the relationships with the information providers and the uses and innovations in the industry amongst other things.  I found his talk to have the deepest level of content from all of our guest lecturers. In part it was due to all of the projects that SII is involved in. Also because his talk had historical and speculative aspects. He spoke about how he was seen the uptake of spatial information over his career and how he can not guess as to what the spatial information industry will look like in 5 years time.  The information is there, it is being collected and anyone at all can view it and manipulate it to the degree that the technology that they have access to allows them too. 

This is an area that I find to be overwhelming. The amount of data and rate of innovation leave me boggled. I must admit that all my mobile phone can do is make phone calls and I still draw mud maps to put in my pocket whenever I cycle somewhere new. So there is a bit of the Luddite in me.  However the descriptions of the advantages gained from having this information left me thoroughly impressed. The fire response, lidar mapping, the dynamic Vicmap base all impressed upon me the importance of this field, as well as the expectations that we all have that the most up to date info is available for us right now. 

The second half of the class looked at emotional intelligence. I really have no idea about what mine is. I think that I perceive and understand emotions well but I am not so good at using or managing them. The clip of Daniel Goleman included a discussion about ability vs ambition and how emotional intelligence is allied with ambition. It reminded me of the characters in a piece on mathematics called Manifold Destiny by Syliva Nasar and David Gruber. In it there are two prominent mathematicians, one who is devoted to the numbers and the other devoted to influence. Both with massive ability but it is obvious that the mathematician who seeks to be a powerful figure has far more emotional intelligence than the one who lives with his mother and solves incredibly difficult problems.  In this example both seem to be achieving their personal and career goals. Being severely lacking in the quality of genius it seems that I have something to gain from looking into EI. In fact, this whole series of lectures around personalty traits has offered up a lot for reflection and even though I have not agreed with it all there will be benefits for me from having encountered it. 

Week 8 - Surveyor General and Learning Styles

Class Date: Thursday, 15th September, 2011

The majority of this week's class was taken up by a presentation from the Surveyor General of Victoria, John Tulloch.  I found it to be an interesting presentation as it outlined the umbrella of considerations that surveyors in Victoria have to work under.  Another point of interest for myself is that I shall be working in the Surveyor General's office when I graduate. It seems strange that I should be learning about my future workplace while at university but sometimes the broad overviews are hard to come by when in an organisation (I am currently working part time in the Land Titles Office). Of most interest to me was the section on the geodetic responsibilities of the office. I enrolled in this course aiming to become a cadastral surveyor but now I am more inclined to work in the geodetic field and it is encouraging to see that I'll be in a workplace where I can gain experience in that area.

The learning styles presentation from Prof. Shortis was a continuation on from last weeks class on personality types and working in teams. I'd come across this before due to previous studies. Many years ago I considered becoming a high school teacher. My classroom practicals made me quickly realise that it was not the career for me. Learning styles, personality types and psychological development were all covered early in the degree. I can see the benefits of identifying your own biases in order to be able to adapt yourself to your surrounding circumstances. It is also good to be able to gauge the styles of those who you are dealing with in order to effectively communicate with them. 

I have similar hesitations to this as I did with personality types. I'd hate to see people take this too seriously and not realise that it is merely a rough categorisation tool and not a specific measurement of the person.  And I would be disappointed if someone took a test and thought that they shall forever be one type of person and veer away from fields associated with the other classified areas. Both they and the community would be poorer because of it. 

Week 7 - Personality Types and Working in Teams

Class Date: Thursday, 8th September, 2011

Today's class looked at the individual and then how individuals work together. Prior to the class we were asked to undertake a test that is similar to the Myers-Briggs personality test. I had done a similar test 13 years ago during my final year of high school and my classification was the same, INTP. I view these things with strong skepticism as to me their foundations seem shaky. Psychoanalysis is to the personality what astrology is to astronomy, a starting point that needs very much to be improved upon. However, my objections were not quite so strong when I was told that I had shared traits with Socrates, Newton and Einstein.

But I realise that this is just a tool to view and understand ourselves and other people. It does not provide a definite definition of the self. And, like all tests, there are factors that limit its accuracy. Is the person being honest? Is it a complete test? How is the person feeling that day? And so on. So the results are not absolute and should never be used to define a view of a person, be it yourself or others.

I do think that there are good personality and psychological tools out there. The book The Happiness Hypothesis  by Jonathan Haidt provided me with an excellent overview of the history of psychology and the search for the good life. It looked back as far as Buddha and the ancient Greeks and included up to date empirical research. It pointed me to an academic website called Authentic Happiness that has a suite of interesting and evolving tests. I don't know whether these would be useful for teaching as there isn't a large peripheral industry around them yet and so I don't think that the ideas have become part of modern business culture. Which is a shame as I do think that they offer a richer analysis of the individual. (edit 15/9/2011, I just found out that Geelong Grammar include positive psychology as part of their curriculum and that they base it upon the researchers behind Authentic Happiness.)

The second half of the class dealt with working in teams. I've never had a bad team experience, or if I have I've never dwelt on it. I guess that may also mean that I've never learnt from it. In the class the notion of team work and how to structure teams was looked at. The previous topic of personality types was a good lead in. Teams are comprised of different people completing separate tasks so to have the best team possible you want to have the most appropriate person in each role. And by knowing which personality types suit specific roles you are part of the way there.  Again, this classification of roles bothers me. I realise that the categories should only be used as guides but if they are out there and become part of the business norm then there is every chance of people taking them too seriously and letting them become the sole guide of the decision making process. But perhaps that is just my personality type makings a stand.

Some random thoughts that crossed my mind during the class......
- In a workplace personality types should be known to make dealing with each other easier (it probably will never happen as it will just become another label and path to discriminate).
- If I need to find another house mate, or try my hand at speed dating, I'll include the Myers-Briggs test, just to make it interesting.
- Team building by statistics seems to be taking place in the now Brad Pitt movie, Moneyball.
- My two favorite teams were created due to horrible circumstances. The enigma crackers and the Manhattan Project.
- I wonder if anyone has looked at the structure of the Circus from Le Carre's Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy and personality types of it's members.
- Though there is not a hint of team work the personality types of the characters in I, Claudius would be very interesting. Though historical and cultural differences would probably mean that the the personailty types are completely redundant.