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.